J. G. Sandom
The Wave
Acknowledgements
The following individuals not only provided me with assistance in the creation of this book, but they were — and remain — a great source of inspiration: my readers, Sylvana Joseph and James Wynbrandt; the journalist Juan Antonio Hervada, for his insights on the wars in Lebanon; Mark Douglas Thompson, whose technical expertise concerning computer systems remains unparalleled; Dr. James L. Olds, Director of the Krasnow Institute and fellow Amherst College graduate, for his broad-ranging scientific insights and knowledge of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute; Carl and Vanessa, in whose pool house much of The Wave was originally conceived and written; and my daughter, Olivia, for her patience and fortitude. To all these individuals, and to the countless others who have helped me on my way, I am forever grateful.
J. G. Sandom
May 2010
Dedication
For Olivia,
who sweeps my heart away each day.
Epigraph
The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.
PROLOGUE
Dr. James White had brought his wife to the Bahamas as soon as they had learned that she had cancer. Fifty-five yet spry, with short gray hair and sporting a navy one-piece bathing suit, Doris sat in a deck chair on the private beach reading yet another murder mystery. Dr. White watched her out of the corner of his eye and sighed. A great sorrow filled his heart but he only smiled when she turned and asked him, “Why don’t you just get the hell out of here, James? You look bored to death.”
“Not at all,” he lied. He pretended to read the manuscript on his lap. It was a treatise on subduction written by one of his graduate students back at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. “I’m having a great time,” he continued. “Want another iced tea?”
Doris scowled. “We’ve been married for twenty-three years, James. Don’t you think I know when you’re miserable? For God’s sake, why don’t you go for a swim? Take a walk. Hunt seashells. Go for a drive in that silly little Moke you rented. Do something! If I hear you sigh like that one more time I’m going to shoot myself before the crab gets me.”
“That isn’t funny, dear,” he said. He dropped the manuscript on his lap.
“It wasn’t meant to be.” She reached out and took him by the hand. “Honestly, James. I’m fine here by myself. And if I need anything, I’ll just ask Harvey.” She glanced over at the muscular black man in a starched white uniform beside the swimming pool bar. “He’s better looking than you ever were.”
Dr. White laughed. Then he stood and stretched, looking at his wife the whole time. She was still beautiful, even after all these years. In a month or two she would be bald. After the chemotherapy. But she’d still be beautiful to him. He tried to smile, chiding himself for all the time he’d spent away from her on field trips, or lecturing at foreign universities and symposia. He’d been in the Canary Islands two months earlier, working on his book, when she had telephoned and told him to come home. They had found a lump under her left armpit. That had been the harbinger. The first sign of impending doom. The omen. “I think I’ll take a drive then, head over into town,” he said. “Do you want me to get you anything?”
She smiled and it occurred to him that it was this that had made him fall in love with her, in graduate school, over twenty-five years earlier. Her smile was devastating. He could still feel his heart throb every time he saw it.
“Another bottle of rum would be nice,” she said. “The dark one we had yesterday.”
She was drinking like a fish, but there was little point in arguing. “Alright,” he answered, as he slipped on his Hawaiian shirt and sandals. “I’ll see you in an hour or so for lunch, back at the hotel. Save some lobster for me.” With that he turned and trudged back up the beach.
It took him only a few minutes to dress in the bedroom of their bungalow overlooking the Atlantic. The hotel was expensive but he didn’t care. Nothing mattered now but his wife’s happiness and comfort. And she had grown up wealthy on Cape Cod. She was used to the finer things in life. He checked himself in the mirror — trying to ignore the distended belly, the balding head, the wrinkles around his eyes — and, with another sigh, dashed through the door.
The front seats of the Moke, a kind of open-air mini jeep, were baking hot. He started her up without a fuss and made his way along the white, shell-covered driveway of the hotel, out the main gate and into the palmary. He was glad now that he’d left Doris behind. Despite himself, her very presence made him depressed these days, and he felt guilty for a moment as he followed the twisting narrow road between the palm trees. It wasn’t her fault she was sick, he told himself. Of course, the cigarettes hadn’t helped; she’d been smoking since she was fifteen.
As he turned a bend and quit the palmary, the sun blasted down onto his neck and the entire east coast of the island opened up before him. It was an amazing view. The ocean glimmered to his right, gleamed and glistened, with a pale moon high in the turquoise sky. He pulled the Moke over onto the side of the road and got out.
Down the coast, he saw a chevron jutting from the water, like the naked backbone of some beached leviathan. The landscape was littered with boulders, bloated and huge, some over a thousand tons, ripped from the ocean floor and dumped unceremoniously onto the ground a hundred meters from the sea. One hundred and twenty thousand years ago, he thought. It must have been a frightful storm. Terrible in its ferocity. Relentless. As violent as the one that raged inside his heart.
He turned and stared across the shimmering Atlantic, far, far away, at the waves that crawled inexorably to shore, at the pale toenail of the crescent moon which dangled in the sky above him, the slightest paring, almost diaphanous. He knew what had launched the monumental forces that had carved these islands in the stream. It was the subject of his latest book. But despite his understanding, the sight of those great boulders and that distant chevron charged him with a sense of awe. And suddenly, from nowhere, he recalled the ending of a poem he had learned in college, years before — Dover Beach, by Mathew Arnold:
Dr. White stared across the glittering sea. Then he looked up at the sky, at the pitiless blueness of the firmament. “Dear God,” he said. “What have I done?”
SECTION I
Masjid
Chapter 1
John Decker, Jr., drove along I-74 in a non-descript tan van packed full of electronic equipment, across the bridge that spanned the Mississippi, from Illinois toward Bettendorf in the Quad Cities, Iowa. A Cryptanalyst Forensic Examiner with the FBI, Decker had been contacted two hours earlier and told to drive out — on the double — to a farm in the little town of New Liberty, Iowa, in order to intercept and decipher some communications. As he drove across the bridge, he stared down at the glassy Mississippi. The river moved lethargically below, wide-bellied and recalcitrant, studded with chunks of ice. It was a cold, gray day. The highway was still covered with smatterings of snow. He passed another semi carrying feed and realized that he hadn’t been back to Iowa for almost fourteen months. A long time. Yet nothing had changed. Rock Island looked the same, despite the thinning of the military base. The bridge still needed painting. The river still rolled inexorably toward New Orleans. He pulled into the right lane, a dozen yards or so in front of the truck, and tried to tear his mind away. He should be happy, he told himself. It was rare he was called into the field; normally he was lashed to his desk. But he felt as though the frigid waters of the river were pulsing through his veins. Decker was going home.