Alison typed it again.
After a long wait both dolphins finally responded with Okay.
“Go!” shouted Alison to the crew.
The Pathfinder’s giant engines roared to life and the ship pushed forward. The chain became taut as the Pathfinder pulled hard against it. A shudder ran through the entire hull. Both crew and passengers held tight as the ship strained under the pull of the chain and anchor.
“Full power!” barked Emerson.
The engines roared louder. The chain scraped loudly on the side of the ship. Very slowly and below deck, the half-cut link near the windlass began to twist under the stress. Inch by inch it continued to stretch and pull until the chain finally exploded sending the broken end smashing through the hull as the ship lurched forward.
Nearly everyone on the bridge lost their hold and fell to the floor. The Pathfinder sailed across the giant swell and smashed bow first into the next wave. In the lounge, passengers bounced off the bulkhead and over tables grasping for each other as they fell.
17
The President’s VH-3 helicopter, Marine One, slowly approached the back lawn of the White House and stopped in a hover just a few feet above the grass. It gently touched down with little more than a bump as the giant shocks absorbed the weight of the heavy craft. The marine on board waited for the rotors to begin winding down before opening the door and deploying the step ladder. He held Kathryn Lokke’s hand and helped her down the first steps and into the hand of a second marine waiting at the bottom.
She instinctively clutched her satchel tight as she reached the ground and was quickly escorted away from the helicopter. An older man with gray hair approached with a quick short stride that almost made it look as though he were stumbling. Bill Mason was the White House Chief of Staff and known for his no-nonsense approach to all things security. Kathryn had only met him a few times before and noted he always seemed impatient and in a hurry, though relatively polite.
“Nice to see you again Ms. Lokke,” he said, motioning up a small manicured path that headed toward the back entrance of the White House. “Please follow me.”
They reached a set of thick double doors and stepped inside where Kathryn was asked to put her things on a conveyor belt to be scanned. She was then patted down by a female Secret Service agent and escorted forward. Kathryn quickly grabbed her bag from the far end of the belt and continued following Mason.
“Your flight was a few minutes late, so the President should be waiting.” Mason turned a corner and led her down a flight of stairs into the basement. Two additional turns left them at the doors to the infamous Situation Room. “Is there anything you need?”
Kathryn shook her head. She had gone over the material and the presentation several times.
President John Carr was standing when she entered the room. He turned to meet them as Mason stepped in behind her. “Mr. President, may I introduce Dr. Kathryn Lokke from the USGS.”
President Carr seemed to tower over her with his six foot, four inch frame. “Pleased to meet you Ms. Lokke.”
She smiled nervously. “It’s my pleasure, Mr. President. Thank you for meeting with me.”
“Not at all,” he replied, as he stepped back and grabbed a chair. “Please forgive me for being curt, I have a call with Israel in about twenty minutes. Shall we get started?”
“Yes, yes of course,” Kathryn answered and quickly fumbled to get her laptop out of her bag. Several other men were already sitting around the table. She recognized the Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Advisor. Most of the others wore decorated uniforms and looked to be high ranking officers from the military.
She started speaking as she opened up her laptop and connected the cable to the giant monitor behind her. “Mr. President,” she looked at the others, “gentlemen, the USGS has been closely tracking some accelerating changes in the Earth’s north and south poles for the last couple of decades, and more specifically the last several years.” She pressed a button and the large screen lit up with the map she was displaying on her laptop screen.
“These are four pictures, two of the Arctic and two of the Antarctic. The pictures in each set are separated by two years.” She turned around to point to the screen. “From this high a level you can easily see the changes occurring, and in fact these changes are accelerating. You may have heard a few years ago that a huge section of the Ronne Ice Shelf separated and fell into the ocean, floating north. The separation of the shelf happened due to the growing weight and pressure of the ice pack as measured over the years, at which point the pressure surpasses the strength of the frozen ice and a collapse occurs.” Kathryn hit a button on her laptop and a larger screen of the Antarctic was displayed. It was a satellite image from earlier in the year and showed the giant Ronne shelf piece which had broken off. It could already be seen a few hundred miles away in the photo. “This break was a surprise but fortunately the impact was not serious.” She paused and looked around the room again. “The reason I am here is because a few days ago we received a very large wake up call.”
“An earthquake, or more specifically a geological shift, has occurred along the shelf and this time not in the ice.” She advanced to the next slide which showed the large ice portion of the shelf. Further south a red line traced the shift that just occurred. It was clear the recent shift was on land and near the first large mountain range heading into the heart of the continent. “When the huge part of that ice shelf broke off years ago, it floated away. It floated because it was ice and its overall mass was less dense than the water below it.” The screen now zoomed in on the red line. “This latest shift occurred at the base of a glacier which is a far heavier section of land mass than just ice. This land mass has now dropped by almost fifteen feet.”
President Carr looked around the table and back at Lokke. “What does this mean?”
Kathryn paused. Her heart was beating fast but she wanted to be careful how she phrased this. “It means a high level of risk for an impending natural disaster.”
Mason spoke up from the left side of the table. “How high a risk are we talking about?”
“We don’t know exactly,” Kathryn sighed. She noticed a couple of the men frown. “We cannot determine how high without a more accurate timeline. Measured in likelihood and impact, the risk is…very high.”
One of the men started to speak but the President held up a hand. “Ms. Lokke, when you say impact what do you mean?”
“Well,” she started, “there are a number of scenarios escalating in severity. The scenario we must consider is a massive slide of that glacial base into the ocean which would send a giant tsunami up through the Atlantic, and of a size like modern history has never seen.”
“As big as the one in Indonesia?” asked Mason.
“Bigger. Much bigger. This could have the energy to destroy every major city or seaport on either side of the Atlantic all the way up to London. The surge could reach many miles inland which means several orders of magnitude larger than Indonesia.”
There was a long silence in the room.
“So,” the National Security Advisor took off his glasses and held them between his two fingers, “what do we do?”
Hank Stevas was a highly political figure. Short and in his late sixties, he had attracted criticism from both sides of the aisle for being confrontational and overly brash, or rude as others would politely call him. Someone Kathryn was hoping would not be in this meeting.
Kathryn took a deep breath. “Well, the best step would be to take a proactive approach and try to avoid what could turn out to be a global panic. This would mean purposely finding a way to relieve some of the strain being created. There are few possibilities that require a certain amount of time and resource-”