CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Oceanside, Arsenault
Far under the seabed a thousand kilometers from Oceanside, two huge tectonic plates, perhaps as much as two hundred kilometers thick, suddenly shifted, thrusting one upward, displacing huge quantities of seawater. This happened twice within a space of ten minutes, the second quake being the greater of the two, about 9.0 on the scale used to measure such things. Both events created waves that raced toward land at up to nine hundred kilometers an hour in the open sea. The first wave to hit the beach at Oceanside was estimated to have reached a height of ten meters; it had slowed by then to a mere sixty kilometers per hour.
The building Jak Daly and Felicia Longpine picked as a refuge was a luxury hotel known as The Seaside. At that time of the morning the lobby was empty except for a uniformed night clerk who looked up, startled, as the pair came crashing through the front door. “Hey! You can’t come in here like that!” the man shouted. “You didn’t wash the sand off! It costs a lot to keep these carpets—”
“Run!” Daly yelled over his shoulder as they made for the stairs. “Tidal wave coming!” At that moment a huge roaring sound engulfed them. The night clerk bolted over the counter on one hand and made it to the bottom stair as water began rushing into the lobby behind him, destroying forever the expensive carpeting.
The Seaside was built with spacious verandas along both sides onto which the rooms exited. The verandas were designed so that residents could sit on them during the day and enjoy the sights, spectacular views of the beaches on the side facing the sea or the town of Oceanside. Felicia was not even breathing hard when she stopped on the second floor, Daly and the clerk so close behind her they almost collided. “Are we high enough?” she asked. They were on the town side of the building and her question was answered immediately as a huge river of dirty water filled with debris swept down the street beneath them.
“Oh, keerist!” the clerk muttered.
People, dazed and sleepy but curious about the uproar, began emerging from their rooms, and soon the veranda was crowded with anxious observers. “Uh-oh,” someone said, laughing, “I hope they don’t charge us extra for this show.”
“Can we get to the other side of the building from here?” Daly asked.
“Sure, but you have to go all the way to the end and around.”
“Then let’s go.”
“Why?”
“In case there’s a following wave, maybe bigger than this one. We ought to have time to get higher if we see it coming.”
The clerk looked at the swirling water in the street below them. He could see smaller buildings collapsing under the water, and people all around them, realizing at last what was happening, began to panic. A woman started to scream. “But what about these people?” The clerk gestured toward the flooded streets and the collapsing buildings.
“We can’t do anything for them right now and we sure won’t be able to help anyone if we get washed away.” Daly started threading his way through the crowd toward the opposite end of the building. Felicia and the clerk followed. By the time they reached the opposite side of the building, they were out of breath. The sun was beginning to rise, peeping, as if cautiously, afraid of what it might illuminate, but what they saw in the increasing light froze them with horror. Another wave was on the way, and although it was still out to sea, it looked much bigger than the first one.
“Omigawd,” the clerk whispered.
“Goddamn, that thing’s coming in fast!” Felicia laughed excitedly and grinned at Daly, who suddenly realized she was enjoying it all!
They stood at the end of the building, right by a stairwell. “Get higher!” Daly shouted, taking the stairs two at a time. They came out on the third floor, a good fifteen meters above the ground level. By then the second wave was just crashing over the beach, shoving before it the water from the first wave that had not yet had time to completely recede from the town.
An elderly couple stood at the railing, transfixed by the sight of the water rushing toward them. The door to their apartment stood open. Daly grabbed Felicia, pulled her inside, and shoved her into the bathroom. He was just returning to help the couple outside when the wave struck with a tremendous force. Daly thought he heard screams above the roar of the water, but he wasn’t sure because the flow picked him up and slammed him into the opposite wall of the room, which filled instantly with filthy, swirling water up to his neck. Suddenly, as fast as it had come in, the water receded, dragging Daly helplessly with it across the floor toward the veranda. He stopped himself only by grabbing the doorjamb and holding tight. The wall on the veranda had disappeared.
Daly got to his feet and stumbled to the bathroom. Felicia lay there in a pool of dirty water, gasping for breath. He lifted her up and hugged her tightly to his chest. As they stood there, a sharp cracking, roaring noise enveloped them and the floor beneath them began to vibrate. The roaring grew in intensity, rising in volume as it seemed to approach them. They staggered outside onto what was left of the veranda. What Daly saw there froze him for an instant into helpless, animal terror.
The front part of the Seaside Hotel, its foundations undermined by the force of the water, was collapsing into the flood, each floor slowly, almost gracefully pancaking onto the one beneath it. The whole front of the building, like an enormous, disintegrating ice floe, slid in slow motion down into the water under a huge cloud of white dust. Daly could clearly see people, many people, among the debris disappearing along with furniture and huge chunks of masonry into the water that was beginning to flow back out to sea. All he could do was stand there and await his turn to tumble down into the water. But the collapse stopped suddenly about twenty meters from where the pair were standing.
The hotel clerk and the elderly couple that had been standing on the veranda when the wave hit had disappeared. A young man dressed only in a pair of shorts emerged from a nearby room, soaking wet, and stared at Daly, eyes wide, his mouth working soundlessly as if he couldn’t get his breath. “Have you seen my girlfriend?” he finally managed to croak. The thick cloud of dust drifted back over them, coating them white, like bakers at the end of a long shift, making them cough and their eyes water. In an instant it passed on the wind.
At that point Felicia said, “Let’s get the hell outta here!” Taking Daly by the hand, she stumbled back into the stairwell. Inside it was bedlam as dozens of people pushed and slipped down the stairs. Those near the bottom shrieked and screamed for those above to stop pushing because the first floor was still full of rushing water. Even so many fell into it and were swept out to sea with the receding flood. Daly and Felicia braced themselves against the railing and managed by physical force to stop the descent of desperate people from the upper floors in their mindless downward spiral. But they weren’t sure for how long they could hold them, so strong was the instinct in everyone, even Daly and Felicia themselves, to run. In every mind was the unspoken dread of a third wave.
“Goddammit, get a grip on yourselves, you fucking animals!” a voice that sounded like God’s bellowed down the stairwell from an upper floor. But it wasn’t God, it was Gunnery Sergeant Folsom Braddocks.
Daly could never mistake Braddocks’s voice for anyone else’s. “Gunny! It’s Jak Daly, down here!” he yelled.
Felicia laughed and shook her head in disbelief, a huge grin on her face. “Gunny,” she sighed. Everyone at OTC knew Braddocks by then.
Braddocks shouldered his way through the crowd. He would have been a ludicrous sight under normal circumstances as he was wearing only shorts and boondockers. A frightened young lady clung to his arm. “A guy can’t have a goddamn weekend liberty without something fuckin’ it all up on him,” he groused. He stopped where Daly and Felicia clung to the railing, holding the crowd back. “Well”—he grinned at the pair—“we’ve got a job to do. Come on.” He continued on down the stairwell, shouting, “You people, stand fast! We’ll tell you when you can come all the way down.” Daly had never heard a voice so commanding and penetrating, and it had the desired effect of calming the frightened survivors, who began clearing places to sit on the stairs as the two couples made their way down to the second floor. The young lady clinging to Gunny’s arm never said a word, but it was clear she would never let go of his arm.
Gunny stood at the top of the stairs leading to the ground floor, surveying the turgid mess swirling through the first-floor level. “Oughta go down in a minute,” he muttered, and the water immediately began to lower perceptibly. “Ah!” He dipped a foot into the liquid. “Go down, I say!” he grinned back at Daly, and the water lowered by several centimeters, and then suddenly, with a great sucking sound, it was almost all gone, leaving behind a dirty ankle-deep pool on the first floor.
“Now I know how Moses felt,” Daly said, grinning. They’d made it! Well, not quite yet. The entire city of Oceanside had been reduced to jumbled wreckage. A few of the taller buildings, farther from the shore than the hotel, were still standing, but everything else was gone. Up to their knees in mud, they stood outside what was left of The Seaside Luxury Hotel and looked out over town all the way to the ridge on the far side, a view that would have been impossible before the waves hit. Some structures on the crest of the ridge still stood, but almost everything else between had been swept away.
“Did either of you bring your comm?” Braddocks asked. It was a rule that when candidates departed Camp Upshur, they were to take a handheld with them so that they could be contacted in an emergency.
Daly looked blankly at Felicia. she shook her head. “No, we left them on the goddamned beach!”
“Well, mine’s up in my room and I’m not going back for it now!” Gunny replied. “Boy, we’ve only been here eight months and already we’re thinking like ensigns, aren’t we?”
“Well,” Daly offered in justification, “wouldn’t that have been a sight, us trying to raise the Upshur staff duty officer from the beach while twenty million cubic miles of seawater were rushing down on us?”
Braddocks laughed and thumped Daly on the back. “Daly, spoken like a true NCO! There’s hope for you yet in this man’s Marine Corps!”
Several of the survivors standing nearby did not know how to take this banter in the face of what had just happened to all of them. But they were civilians and did not understand the black sense of humor that kept combat veterans going in the face of the horrors they had to deal with in war.
Braddocks turned to the bedraggled group of survivors. “Listen up, folks, does anyone have a personal comm unit with them?” No one did, they had all fled their rooms in only the clothes they’d been wearing at the time.
“We have to get these people to that high ground.” Gunny turned to Daly. “See that tall building over to your right? That’s the UCR headquarters building. I don’t see a single light on over there or anywhere else, so the power all over what’s left of town must be out, but maybe they have something we can use to call for help. Daly, let’s you and me get over there, see if anybody’s organizing a rescue operation.” Gunny turned to Felicia. “Girl, I don’t know your name, but I’ve seen you around. Can you escort these people to that ridge and then get back to Upshur, get help? You’ll probably have to make it on foot, but it’s only five klicks or so, and you’ve been running three times that every goddamned morning for months. Can do?”
“Bet your ass, I can! My name is Felicia.”
“Good girl, Felicia. Drop these people off there and get back to Upshur. Tell them what happened here and that there’ll be hundreds, maybe thousands of casualties. Muhammad’s cavities, this whole town has been wiped out.” The tension in Braddocks’s voice was the only sign that he had himself been profoundly affected by what they’d just been through. He wiped his forehead and put his free arm around the shoulders of the young woman he was with. “Norma, ease up on that arm, would you?…Oh, this is Norma, excuse me for not making introductions earlier.”
“Pleased, I’m sure,” Norma said, extending a hand. It was ridiculous, Daly thought, there they were in the middle of a disaster area, death perhaps only minutes away if another wave was coming, performing the rituals of polite society. “I’ll help you, Felicia,” Norma said. They formed the hotel’s other survivors into a group, about fifty of them, bedraggled, frightened, but calmer. They began to pick their way up the debris-clogged boulevard that led out of town. They had put about a hundred meters between themselves and what was left of The Seaside Luxury Hotel when even that collapsed with an earthshaking roar.
Aftermath, Oceanside
The trek to the ridge was a nightmare. Debris and bodies were everywhere, forcing Felicia to make many detours. Wading through the slop was exhausting. They tried to avoid looking at the corpses. Of them all, Felicia knew best that by the end of that day, certainly by the next, the unburied dead would become a serious health threat to the survivors.
She kept moving up and down the line of bedraggled refugees, encouraging and assisting those who were having trouble. Everyone understood that if another wave came and they were caught in the open, there’d be no hope for them. But with Norma’s help and then the cooperation of the refugees themselves as they realized they were going to make it to safety, morale picked up and even the elderly among the group found they had reservoirs of endurance that they’d never before realized.
Several dozen others had crawled to the ridge before them. Many were injured, and all had lost family members and friends. Felicia knew many more would die behind them if help didn’t come quickly.
But Felicia could not abandon her companions just yet. She made six more trips up and down the ridge, assisting other people she could see struggling vainly to make it to safety. She physically carried several elderly people who would not have made it on their own. When the physical exertion began to make itself felt at last, she rested briefly; she still had to make it back to Camp Upshur.
As she sat looking back over what had once been one of the most delightful spots in Human Space, Felicia realized for the first time the enormity of what had happened. “No more liberty here for a while,” she muttered. Several people nearby looked up at her sharply, but she did not intend the remark as a joke, it was just all she could think to say in view of the enormous destruction they were witnesses to.
“Thank you, miss, for helping us get out of there,” one woman said.
Felicia thanked the lady and explained that she was an officer candidate, as were her two companions, at Camp Upshur. “Young lady,” an older gentleman who stood holding the woman’s hand spoke up, “what’s your name and the names of those two men you were with? My name is Sal Triassi, this is my wife, Ginny, and I’m on Minister Berentus’s personal staff. What’s your name and those of your friends, especially that guy with the leather lungs? I’ll be goddamned sure the minister knows what you and those guys did for us this morning!”
“I have to leave you now. I have to make it back to Camp Upshur. There are Marines there. I’ll get help. Will you people be okay until I can come back with help?”
“How are you going to get back there?” someone asked.
“I’m going to run.”
“All the way?”
“Yes, just as fast as I can, it’s only five kilometers. I can make that easily in twenty minutes, maybe less.” But she wasn’t sure she could really keep up that pace; the physical and mental strain of the last hours had taken its toll on her. The wild thumping of her heart had subsided after she had carried the last elderly survivor up the slope, but she’d have to run the five kilometers barefoot because the sandals she’d been wearing that morning had disappeared somewhere. She simply did not have the heart to ask any of the refugees to loan her their shoes. “I may find someone with a vehicle along the way and get a ride, but in the meantime my friends Gunny Braddocks and Jak Daly are down there at the UCR headquarters building, organizing a relief party, so you folks just sit tight here and they’ll be with you shortly. I’ll be back in an hour.”
Felicia met no one along the road back to Camp Upshur. It took her close to thirty-five minutes to complete the run, and by the time she arrived at the main gate she was on her last reserves of energy. The soles of her feet were raw and bleeding. She stumbled into the guard shack just as the wild thumping in her chest turned into a massive jolt of pain, and before she could tell the MP on duty anything, she collapsed.
UCR Headquarters Building, Oceanside
The first two floors of the five-story UCR building had been washed out completely by the second wave. Because of the early hour, only a few employees were on duty at the time the disaster struck, and they had sufficient warning to seek safety on the upper floors. Fortunately, those few people, about a dozen, were security and fire personnel; unfortunately, all power systems were down. Because the climate was so equitable at Oceanside, with never any violent storms or other natural disasters, UCR had never bothered to install a backup system to supplement the town’s power supply. But there was no panic among these personnel, only frustration because there was nothing they could do to help the survivors.
The two Marines walked into the UCR command center on the fourth floor. The room looked like a command center, with consoles and security monitors and communications equipment in place. But nothing appeared to be working. A small knot of people in uniform stood gathered about a window looking seaward at the devastation. “Just who are you two?” a burly, middle-aged man demanded of the two Marines. “We saw you coming,” he added. “Tell us what you saw out there.” He was wearing a big silver badge on his short-sleeve shirt and had the air of command about him. “These people”—he gestured to the men and women standing nearby—“are my night shift.”
“My name is Folsom Braddocks and this is Jak Daly. We’re from Camp Upshur.”
“Yeah, I could tell by the way your hair is cut,” the burly man said, and several others laughed nervously. “My name is Jacksen, I’m night supervisor for UCR operations here. We’re gathering up what emergency gear and first-aid stuff we can so we can get to work. Will you help?”
“Damned straight,” Daly replied at once, “but we think you should get out of here as quickly as possible. We just came from The Seaside and you probably saw what happened there. We were hoping you had some sort of communication with the outside world, so we could ask for help.”
“We sent a runner back to Upshur on foot,” Braddocks added, “but she won’t be there for a while yet. Do you have anything here that’ll reach Upshur or even Training Command?”
“No,” a young woman answered. “My name is Anna Rice, I run the public service communications network. All we have that is working are these handheld two-way communicators we use to contact our police patrols and emergency crews but”—her voice broke—“but we haven’t been able to—” She gave a helpless hand gesture.
“We know. You’ve seen what it’s like out there. The streets are nearly impassable. Anyone who was outside when those waves hit—” Daly shook his head.
“Give us some of that gear,” Gunny Braddocks demanded, “and we’ll go with you.”
“We don’t have any heavy equipment and we’ll need a great deal of help to clear the debris, to get at any survivors and recover the bodies,” Jacksen admitted. “All we can do is render first aid to those people on the ridge and hope that help is on the way.”
“It is. But we’d better get out there quick,” Daly said, glancing nervously over at Braddocks. He thought he had just felt a vibration in the floor beneath his feet. Braddocks nodded back at him. “Mr. Jacksen, we don’t have much time. I think this building is going to fall.”
They had been on the ridge for about twenty minutes when the UCR headquarters building finally collapsed.
A Ridgetop, above Oceanside
Hundreds of survivors gathered on the ridge above town. Many of them were seriously injured, and almost all of them were in some stage of shock. There were far too many for Jacksen and his small group of volunteers to help; within minutes their first-aid supplies were exhausted. All they could do afterward was comfort the injured with assurances that help was on the way.
“Are you military personnel?” a burly, middle-aged man asked at one point.
“Yes, sir,” Jak answered.
“Do you know that young lady who was through here a while ago, then? She want to Camp Upshur to get help.”
“Yes, sir,” Braddocks responded, “Candidate Longpine. And who might you be, sir?”
“Sal Triassi, Ministry of War. You people have done a wonderful job today and I’m going to see to it everyone knows about it. If I could have your names…?”
“Later, sir, when we get back to Camp Upshur and get everyone settled. Hell, Mr. Triassi, I’ll buy you a beer in the goddamned canteen!”
“When will help get here? It’s been a good two hours since Miss Longpine left. I gather it’s not that far back to your installation.”
Daly glanced at Braddocks. Well, yes, two hours, that wasn’t unreasonable. But before either could answer, the unmistakable growl of laboring engines came to them distinctly from the direction of the road to Upshur. Daly smiled broadly, relief plainly written all over his face. “Sir, I am proud to announce that the Marines are about to land.”
Aftermath, Oceanside
It was months before even an approximate count of the dead from the disaster at Oceanside could be computed. Of the 2,342 UCR employees in town on the morning of the disaster, 1,121 were confirmed dead; of the 121 OTC candidates in town that morning, only 4 survived. Even worse news for OTC, of the 40 staff members and their entire families in town that morning, only 6 people survived.
Of the 7,847 tourists determined to have been in Oceanside that fatal morning, 3,210 survived the disaster. So of 10,350 people in town that day, almost 6,000 died and only 2,671 bodies were recovered.
An extensive investigation into the disaster concluded there were many reasons why the death toll was so high. First, there was no warning system in place. If tsunamis had occurred in that part of Arsenault in the past, they had struck before the world was settled, and even though the military had been meticulous in its development of Arsenault as its training base, there had simply not been enough time or resources to devote to a comprehensive geological survey of the planet’s crust.
The wave struck in the early morning, when almost everyone was still in bed. That contributed to the casualty toll because so many of the tourists and residents lived in bungalows and garden-style apartment buildings that were under two stories high: every structure in Oceanside was flooded to at least the level of the second floor.
The construction of the larger buildings was also called into question since so many of them collapsed. The entire town had been built on the sand and gravel of an ancient river delta, and the engineers who had built Oceanside took that into consideration when they designed the resort. That is why no buildings there were more than six floors in height. The most devastating of the structural failures was that of The Seaside Luxury Hotel. The only people in the hotel who survived, and over two hundred were known to be residing there when the waves hit, were those the Marines managed to evacuate.
UCR vowed to build a new Oceanside on the ruins of the old, a town bigger and better than the original, and the Arsenault Training Command moved quickly to install a tsunami warning system, but by the time Jak Daly was ready to return to Halfway, it had not yet been put in place.
Manny Ubrik’s body was never found.