Day After Tomorrow Page 8

  Gomez was not a happy camper. But he stopped. Barely. “What do you think I should tell them?”

  Passion welled up in Jack, an emotional fire burning so hot that he almost shouted out his words. “They have to start making long-term preparations now.”

  “Jack, all you’ve got is a theory.”

  “Give me that supercomputer time, Tom, and the theory will become fact.”

  Gomez thought about it. Vorsteen had the ear of the administration, he knew that. He also knew that something was damn well wrong, big time. “All right. You can have it for forty-eight hours.”

  A generous gift, worth about sixty grand in budgetary terms. Jason and Frank had come running up to support their boss. “That’s not much time,” Jason warned.

  Gomez raised his eyebrows. “I can’t—”

  “It’ll do,” Frank assured him.

  Janet Tokada had been standing close by, obviously listening. “Does your model factor in storm scenarios like what we’re seeing?”

  Actually, they were worse. A lot worse. But there was still so much he didn’t know. “We haven’t had time—”

  “Maybe I can help.”

  He thought about that. She sure as hell could. On a number of levels, he suspected. No, hoped. Go slow, fella, you’re too much of a bull, you scare ‘em off. He gave her his best smile, extended his hand. “Welcome aboard.”

  Jason hurried along beside Janet as they headed for the lab. “Hi, I’m Jason,” he babbled.

  Okay, son, Jack thought, do your worst. Or best. It isn’t going to matter.

  At Hedland, the weather had been deteriorating for hours and was now most unusual. This part of the world was born and raised on ferocious winter storms, so the locals weren’t too concerned. They didn’t know the stats, though. They didn’t know that this station had never before recorded this much snowfall at this time of year. Never.

  As Dennis worked to clear the satellite dishes, he listened to the Beeb on his earphones: “It has been twenty-four hours now since snow began falling across the British Isles, and it shows no sign of letting up.”

  Inside the control center, Dr. Rapson also watched the news. One of his assistants had a taste for good tea, and he was happily making up a brew that smelled quite promising. Rapson’s genes were too English for coffee. When the going got rough, what he though about was a nice cuppa, like right now.

  On the telly that was built into the control console, a reporter was reading some quite disturbing news. “An elite RAF search-and-rescue team has been deployed by helicopter to airlift the royal family to safety….”

  Dennis came in, banging his boots on the floor, then rolling them off. “You think they’ll come and get us if we get snowed in?”

  “Not likely,” Rapson responded. “Luckily we have our own generator and enough tea and biscuits to sink a ship. We’ll be fine as long as the loo doesn’t back up again.”

  A BBC reporter speaking from Paris said that the temperature there had fallen well below freezing overnight. This was without question the most radical weather change that Rapson had ever experienced. He did not say it to his assistants, but he thought that they were trapped here, and that they would not survive.

  At NOAA also, they were watching the report from Paris. “Coming in on the heels of the recent floods,” the reporter continued, “the sudden drop left roads literally covered in ice. The weather is equally severe in the rest of Europe.”

  Jack was glad to see the coffee that Jason was bringing in. They’d been tweaking the model round the clock, and even Jack had to admit that he was more than a little tired. Just how tired became clear when he fumbled and dropped his cup as he tried to drink his damn coffee. He didn’t like his body to fight him like this. Work was always more important than physical welfare, and at the moment that was more true than it had ever been.

  They had to get this thing finished, and they had to do it yesterday.

  “Jack,” Frank said as he helped him with the mess, “you’ve been working for twenty-four hours. You’re the only one who hasn’t taken a break.”

  That was true, and Jack had to admit that he was losing effectiveness. A man who couldn’t successfully pick up a cup of coffee could not be expected to be all that accurate entering thousands of data points off paper readouts and identifying their positions and relationships in the model, which was what he had been doing all night. And all yesterday.

  “Maybe I’ll close my eyes for a few minutes. Wake me as soon as we get the first results.” A sofa in his office worked pretty well as a substitute bed. Jack headed for it.

  Janet watched him go. For such a big man, Jack Hall was really wound up tight. “Is he always so obsessive?”

  The young assistant, Jason, answered almost as fast as his partner Frank, and they both said yes. She was fascinated with Jack. He was brilliantly skilled at modeling and also had a vivid way of describing paleoclimate that was very unlike the way most of his colleagues in his dry profession talked about their work. As he’d told her stories of mammoths grazing by a lakeside as supercold gusts from hypercells froze them solid, her mind had vividly pictured the scene.

  It was not a scene that she wanted to see repeated, say, in the middle of New York City, and she was tremendously worried.

  Jason said, “Frank’s been with Jack since the stone age. I’ve only endured five years of servitude.”

  Was he chatting her up? The kid in the group? How fun.

  “If he’s such a tough boss, why do you stay?”

  “Because he’s the best scientist I’ve ever met.”

  Then Frank said, “We’re done.”

  Janet looked at him. She did not like the expression on his face. Somewhere deep inside her, perhaps she felt that their finishing the model would somehow unleash the disaster it implied on the world. Or maybe she was just damn tired, too, not to mention damned scared. Without another word, Frank rose from his chair. The three of them headed for Jack’s office.

  Rain was literally gushing down the windows at Pinehurst. The lovely grounds had become a sheet of gray water punctuated by trees and, here and there, the upper part of a car. The road out was still clear, though, as most of the flooding was confined to the athletic fields.

  The corridors were crowded with students carrying suitcases, and Sam was totally revolted by the stench that permeated the building. Old was not entirely beautiful, it seemed. The reek of sewage did not go well with beautifully tailored school blazers and all the rest of the ritz, and that made Sam feel a little better.

  “I guess the school’s plumbing is really old or something,” Sam said into his cell phone. “Anyway, all this rain’s backed up the sewage system.”

  Jack wanted Sam home. He wanted him home right now. He did not think that he should tell him why, though, because he also did not want Sam to attempt any journeys that were going to be too dangerous. Jack

  had been concerned about all this for some time. But now he was more than concerned, he was scared. No, terrified.

  In the background, visible on a TV in the supercomputer room, the president was addressing the nation.

  “Where are you going to stay tonight, Sam?”

  “They’re going to find places for us with the kids who live here.”

  It was as Jack had feared. “Are you sure you can’t get any tickets for today? Why does it have to be tomorrow?”

  If he was right, this thing was about to turn real, real mean. Tomorrow could well be too late. “Believe me, if I could, I would. This stink is, like, unbelievable.”

  “This is serious, Sam.”

  “So’s the smell!”

  He didn’t get it, not at all. Jack wanted to blurt it out, but then he would have to add the truth, that he thought that there was a good possibility that the world as they had known it was ending; indeed, that they might never see one another again. “Sam, I want you home.”

  “I stood in line for two hours to get these tickets, Dad.”

  Jack’s hea
rt was breaking. He glanced over at the president on the TV screen, then started to tell Sam the truth.

  Sam said, “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna miss the train.”

  Maybe the lines would still be open tomorrow. Maybe it would even be safe. “Okay.”

  “Gotta go, Dad!”

  “Okay. I love you.”

  Sam closed his cell phone. Laura was saying, “Guess what, we’ve got a place to stay.”

  There was J.D., grinning away. So they would be going to his place. At least the invitation wasn’t just for Laura. “Great,” Sam said. He raised the edges of his mouth in what he hoped was a believable approximation of a smile.

  EIGHT

  T

  he lowest temperature ever experienced in the United Kingdom was recorded at Braemar, not far from Balmoral Castle in Royal Deeside. On January 10, 1982, it reached minus seventeen degrees Fahrenheit, hut a glance at the external temperature monitor told RAF flight lieutenant Scott Harrow that it must be far below that on the ground right now.

  Minus forty-four at eighteen hundred feet meant that it was probably around minus thirty-five on the ground. It must be ungodly cold in Balmoral Castle, where they were headed. The royals had gotten snowed in and the heating system had failed. This, extraordinarily enough, was a rescue mission to puli the queen and her spectacularly grumpy husband, Prince Philip, out of a dangerous situation.

  One did not think of them as really old until you saw them up close. Scott, as a member of the Queen’s Flight, had been close to them many times, and they were frail old people in nice clothes, basically.

  “Look at those cars, they’re not moving,” his copilot said.

  The chopper was passing over the A-93, the Old Military Road, that connected through Royal Deeside. Scott gazed down at the long line of vehicles. It looked as if the entire town of Braemer was trying to convoy out. And it looked as if they were snowbound. That was death down there, probably a lot of it.

  “Radio HQ, tell them to send somebody out to check on it.”

  It was getting damned cold in the helicopter, despite its heating system, and Scott could see why. They were at minus fifty-two. Flight Officer Williams said, “This can’t be right.” But his gauge and Scott’s agreed.

  Minus fifty-eight.

  Now the stick became sluggish. “What the hell’s going on?”

  A spiderweb of cracks appeared on Scott’s external-temperature gauge. It was connected to an external pitot tube, which would be directing a thin stream of outside air onto its measuring filament. Obviously, the temperature inside the instrument was dropping below its tolerance minimums.

  The stick was not properly responsive. Scott was a little afraid, frankly. This was not a good sign, this sort of control issue. Instinct made him glance again out the window. This was no place to attempt a counterrotation landing.

  Williams yelled, “The bloody hydraulic fluid is starting to freeze!”

  A moment later, a Christmas tree of warning lights began flashing. Everything that required hydraulic pressure was beginning to malfunction.

  Hydraulic fluid freezes at minus one-fifty Fahrenheit.

  Scott tried to reduce altitude, on the theory that he might get a slightly higher temperature closer to the ground.

  “Pan! Pan! Pan! Royal two-zero flight controls are not responsive,” he said into his microphone. “Attempting autorotation. We’re going in. Repeat, this is Royal two-zero—”

  He heard the voice of safety start, “Your fuel pressure has dropped below the required safety limit. Please correct this condition. Your fuel pressure—”

  He hauled the stick back with every ounce of strength in his body.

  Nothing whatsoever happened.

  He heard the beginning of the crash, a long, sighing crackle as the fuselage went sliding along the steel-hard surface of the snow.

  That was the last thing he heard.

  The other two choppers in the flight closed position. Squadron Leader Major Wilfred Tyne was appalled at what he had just seen. Scott and Willie had plunged out of the air like a bloody stone. They had not lived, he knew that. He’d seen the aircraft break up on impact. There was no smoke back there, though, meaning that it hadn’t exploded. Which was odd, considering that all three helicopters were fully fueled for the trip out here and back, given that Balmoral’s fuel depot might not be operating if their power generators had all failed.

  Suddenly he heard Chopper 3 sing out, “Port engine pressure dropping.”

  The pilot shouted, “Attempt relight on one.”

  They’d damn well lost a bloody engine, and Wilfred knew why: these helicopters were below their operational minimums on temperature. They were damned well freezing to death.

  He saw Chopper 3 fall back, wobbling in the sky. Then he heard, “Flameout on starboard engine as well.”

  He began circling. His third chopper dropped, then a fairly good counterrotation started. They got it back under a semblance of control. Excellent, they were at least going to be able to make a crash landing.

  Then he saw the wing slowly just stop moving. No rotation, no counterrotation, nothing. For a long second, the helicopter hung motionless, as if it were taking a moment for it to realize that it had to drop.

  It fell away gracefully, drifting lazily to one side, then plummeted toward the ground. It disappeared in a spray of snow. He’d just lost his flight. He was too stunned to grasp it. Six men were dead and the rescue mission was in a shambles.

  Then his own instrument panel began flashing emergencies.

  “Entering autorotation,” he said, “select emergency fuel.”

  “Emergency fuel selected on both.”

  Wilfred pressed the collective lever. He might as well have been pressing on a brick in a wall, for all the movement he got.

  “Come on, you bastard!”

  He could not lose his whole flight. Then what the bloody hell would happen to the damned queen?

  “Come on, you bastard!”

  “Selecting manual pilot override.”

  Using all his strength, he managed to keep the chopper under a sort of control as it descended. A quick glance told him the altimeter was unwinding in a blur. He fought the wing, seeking to get some kind of dihedral going, feeling just the slightest response as air pressure over the twisting rotor blades increased.

  Then there was a sharp BANG, followed at once by a terrific jolt to the left, then a ferocious tumbling that never seemed to end.

  When it was over, though, there was movement inside the twisted airframe. A moment later, a broken door fell off into the snow with a dull thud, and Wilfred climbed out. He stood in his shredded flight suit staring off down a long, snow-choked vale.

  Was that smoke down there? Perhaps a wisp of it was coming from a house otherwise buried in the drifts. He started down. As the shock of the crash wore off, though, he realized that his thigh was burning. It felt as if coals were being pressed against him. Instinctively, he clutched at the rip in his flight suit that was letting in the supercold air.

  But it was too late, far too late. He kept plodding, but his movements slowed. He was so cold that his sensations failed him. It felt not as if he was freezing, but as if he were burning.

  He came to a stop. He knew that this had happened, but distantly, the way a man knows a thing in a dream. Then he knew no more.

  He’d frozen solid, a stick of gum still in his mouth. Like the mammoths of Alaska so long ago. But they’d been chewing daisies. Wilfred favored Doublemint.

  The wind came across the vale, howling down out of the north, drawing graceful snow ghosts with it across the ridges and the rounded hilltops. It hit

  Wilfred in the face, causing his helmet’s plastic visor to shatter.

  Wilfred swayed with the wind, then toppled back. When his body hit the chopper’s exposed left landing gear, it shattered like glass, falling to the ground in pieces. In time, they would be reduced to bones, this strange scattering of limbs, head, and torso. But first the
re would be snow, racing, tumbling out of the sky, smothering the crash site beneath a blanket of white and silence.

  Jack and Tom Gomez hurried through the metal detector into the Old Executive Office Building. The security guards hardly looked up from their TV. A reporter was telling about how people were buying up provisions all over Washington. People were not stupid. They didn’t need to be told that something was terribly, terribly wrong.

  “You better be sure about this, Jack. My ass is on the line, here.”