But he had never returned there after the accident. It had been too painful. Now he rented it to a friend on an annual basis. It had been three years since he had been near the place, and even then, though he’d visited someone just a few blocks away, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to go to the cottage.
Now he felt betrayed by the idea that fate might take another piece of his life from him, that he might never see that home again.
Sarah gave him a shove. “You there, Henry?”
“Time to go, hero!” said Kai Grimes, pushing past them on his way out the door. “Listen to mama.”
Sarah stared after him with hate in her eyes. “Is he always as annoying as this?”
“That’s his good side, I think. I keep telling Shep to eat the guy and save the dog food, but Shep thinks he’d be too stringy. That much bone and gristle is hard on the teeth.”
Henry showed up early at the next meeting, this time with Shep in tow. He wanted to talk to the general, and thought it might not be too bad an idea to have his “legal muscle” with him. Shep was game to go anywhere, and his enthusiasm always gave Henry a boost. But, in the tight corridors that separated the labyrinthine flight decks, the dog seemed too big. As they walked the hall s, sailors would jump out of their way as though a man-eating tiger were being paraded past them.
He had felt almost smug about his power of intimidation until Grimes had advised him to keep Shep clear of the aft part of the ship, where the ship’s dogs were kenneled. Henry was surprised to learn that the Enterprise contained a kennel of over thirty specialized dogs. Grimes told him they were mostly sniffers, but there were also few “combat types” that put the fear of God into the men when they walked the halls — the kind of dog Henry had once met.
Sword had been a huge guard dog, a German shepherd, a retiree from the Vietnam War. His most outstanding feature was a dime-sized hole in his snout, put there by an AK47 machine gun. In spite of his wounds, the story went, Sword had attacked and killed two Vietcong who’d shot his master. According to witnesses, the Cong who’d fired was attacked first. The Cong fired again, hitting Sword in the face, but that hadn’t stopped the dog. He’d leaped and grabbed the man’s jaw in his teeth, then ripped his face off. Seeing this, the other Cong screamed and ran. The dog pursued, jumping on the fleeing soldier’s back. As the man fell, the dog crushed his neck and spine with a single bite. Later Sword was retired and, after being “debriefed”, toured the world.
Henry remembered bending to pat the dog’s head and asking the Marine handler, “Does he bite?”
“Yes he does, sir,” the Marine had said, still at attention.
Henry had never forgotten Sword, nor the way the hole in the dog’s snout whistled when he breathed. Of course, Shep wasn’t that kind of dog, and his place in Henry’s heart hadn’t been earned by fear or power, but by mutual respect. Earned on the big ice. But that meeting had convinced Henry that, if he ever went toe- to-toe with a polar bear, he wanted a German Shepherd for a friend.
Now he and Shep entered the meeting room. As expected, Hayes was already there, studying some papers, waiting for the briefing to begin.
He looked up as Henry entered.
“Enthusiastic, eh Henry? I like that.”
“Your earlier briefing was… interesting,” remarked Henry, trying to figure out how to begin his request that Sarah stay on the team.
“That bad?” said the general with a smile.
“No, really. You answered a lot of my questions.”
“Any ideas?”
The general’s question threw Henry off-balance.
“About what?”
“I thought you said you were listening to my talk.”
Henry remembered that the purpose of the general’s meeting had been to open up a forum for ideas. Suddenly he realized how ridiculous he sounded.
“I think Ms French should stay with us,” he said abruptly.
“Why?”
“I guess because she’s now… she’s gotten familiar with my story. I mean she’s interviewed me and tried to get me to remember. Heck, I may have remembered things or said things when I was drugged I might have forgotten… but I did tell her.”
He knew he was completely botching his request.
But Hayes smiled. “Okay. I’ll ask Ms French what she thinks.” He looked back at his papers.
Henry stood there for a moment, not sure how to respond. He didn’t want to seem too happy, nor did he think he should behave too casually. He was still trying to decide how a dispassionate Henry Gibbs would react when the general glanced up at him again.
“Good idea, in fact, Gibbs. I won’t forget. I’ll speak to her. Is there anything else on your mind?”
Henry shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Then grab a seat. The meeting’s about to begin.”
While the officers and staff gathered for the second time, Hayes received an ominous stack of literature from one of his aides. Poring over the first few pages, he didn’t look up for several minutes. When he finally did he seemed surprised to find the room full and everyone looking at him expectantly.
He straightened his back.
“Thank you all for coming. I’ve had our people prepare an analysis of a worst-case scenario. I commend them for having put this together in so short a time. You already know that, if the Ross Ice Shelf should break free due to two or more thermonuclear detonations, we’d have a rise in the world ocean of twenty feet or more, preceded by tsunami of up to… well, who knows? A hundred feet?” The general glanced down at the report. “This report I’m holding says a hundred feet.”
He turned to a large rectangular map of the world that hung on the wall. He used a cigar from his uniform jacket as a pointer. The tip landed squarely on the central United States.
“Goodbye Louisiana and Mississippi. If the shelf breaks free, they’re underwater. At least, according to our experts.” Hayes walked to the desk and picked up the report, a dark blue folder. Underneath was a stack of support material, maps and flow charts. He opened the folder and leafed through the first few pages, muttering to himself as he scanned the text. “I’ve seen most of this already… They gave me so much here… Where is that…? Ah, here we are: ‘Twenty-five feet and up’.”
He looked intently at his audience. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what that would mean. The bottom line is that the United States would be cut in half, losing a third of its real estate to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, almost overnight. The new inland sea would stretch clear up to Missouri.”
He paused a moment to let the gathering absorb what he’d said.
“Any questions, so far?”
No one raised a hand.
He walked back to the map and pointed his cigar again, this time tapping various light-green spots on the map. “This bilious pea-soup colour shows the areas that would be inundated.”
Henry squinted at the map. The green was widespread, covering much of the world’s coastlines.
Most of Europe and Russia were green.
The general started listing the affected areas, jabbing his cigar at different points on the map.
“Look at it all,” he said. “Florida — I was planning to retire there. Canada. Mexico. Much of South America… not Chile. Most of Europe, Siberia, Australia, Africa, Micronesia, Japan. It’s hard to find any landmass that isn’t affected. I mean, just look at Central America. It’s nearly all that colour. One-third of the habitable landmasses are threatened, not to mention almost all port cities. I’m sure each of you can imagine the chaos that would cause.
“So what does this mean? From the get-go, one-fifth of the world’s population would be displaced, forced inland. But the people living there already would, of course, be inclined to hold onto their territory. Sharing is nice when there’s lots to share, but not when it’s him or you depending on a single place to live and produce food. It’d take the world’s shorelines time to recover from the depth changes. A couple hundred years? Thousands? No one seems to know.”