Alexandra came up beside her. Galina was about to tell her girl to get back in the car, then thought better of it.
“Wait here, okay?”
Alexandra nodded.
Galina returned to the passenger side of the Porsche. One of Tattoo’s hands was draped limply over the edge of the seat. She thought it was the one he’d used to choke her.
She tased it. No reaction.
Galina dragged and pushed and finally hauled him onto the shoulder of the road, swearing at him silently.
The Macan’s black leather seats were smeared with his blood. So were her legs and belly.
She wiped it off herself with her torn skirt, and used the sullied fabric to clean up the seats as much as she could. She took a fresh skirt from her suitcase and slipped it on, moving feverishly, frightened almost senseless that a car could come along and stop. One had raced by on the other side of the highway when he was attacking her. Others might have as well. Someone could have called the police. Two cars by the side of the road in the middle of the night? Suspicious, especially to a citizenry trained to be wary.
“Let’s go,” she said to Alexandra, who wanted to sit next to her.
Of course, her daughter was terrified, shaking. She wanted to be near her mother.
Galina pulled a dress from her suitcase and draped it over the passenger seat. She didn’t want Alexandra to get a trace of that animal’s blood on her.
They drove away. Only then did Galina understand that she’d been wheezing and hadn’t taken a full breath in minutes. Her throat hurt, but as they gained speed — and distance from Tattoo’s body — she began to relax enough that she stopped sounding asthmatic.
Alexandra’s eyes were closed. She looked like she was sleeping. Galina put on the radio, keeping the volume low. She wanted to know about Antarctica. Was it still there? Who really knew what a nuclear missile would to do the ice continent?
The explosion had taken place, as threatened, on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The radio announcer’s voice was grave. For good reason: more than three thousand scientists and support staff from around the world had died, swept to their death by powerful blast waves. Now, nuclear snow was said to be falling on parts of the southern ocean.
“And the seas are rising,” the announcer reported.
Not over centuries, Galina thought, as so many of those men and women on Antarctica had predicted, but with the speed of terrorism itself. And that was very fast, indeed.
She shut off the radio and kept driving, grieving as first light creased the eastern sky. She wasn’t sure where they would go. Only that there was no turning back.
CHAPTER 15
The silence in Lana’s NSA office belied the tragedies on several split-screen monitors she kept tuned to government and commercial news feeds. she’d muted the sound, needing to hear nothing more of drowning victims, environmental devastation, and the open panic of the world’s population. The massacre of all the scientists and support personnel in Antarctica was so shocking that she still had difficulty comprehending the loss, made personal when she learned that her college roommate, a renowned paleoclimatologist, had been among the murdered.
The Trident II had hit the continent just north of the Thwaites Glacier at an altitude of about two miles to exert maximum damage from the air. Not a direct strike but close enough to immediately calve glacial chunks the size of Rhode Island into the southern ocean — and incinerate billions of tons of ice now forming massive blizzards that were sweeping across the seas.
Scientists had long considered Thwaites crucial for holding so much of the region’s ice in place, but the blast had widened the glacier’s mouth. And it most certainly had compromised its grounding line, the border of the land that supported the ice and the body of water that would receive it. Glaciologists were certain the explosion would speed up the glacier’s path to the sea, which had been expected to take hundreds of years. The potential for a death toll in the billions from the missile strike would turn into a fast-forward reality if all the ice backed up behind Thwaites were shaken loose, as so many experts now feared.
None of the experts working for, or consulted by, the Defense Department were predicting anything but the most dire ramifications from the explosion.
“Expect sea level rise for a period of weeks, maybe months,” had been the bulletin from DOD. “Expect severe radiation poisoning as polar easterlies carry toxic plutonium from the continent. Expect disturbances both domestic and foreign among threatened populations.”
The parched language of panic.
Already, scientific consensus held that the world was heading for an absolute minimum rise of a meter — if the planet were exceedingly lucky and all of the WAIS didn’t crash into the ocean, a catastrophe that would lift sea levels the full eleven feet. But a meter still constituted a century’s worth of warming in the geological equivalent of a blink.
Trampling had become the leading cause of death in low-lying countries, such as Bangladesh, as populations crowded along coastlines raced away from rising waters. The number of victims already numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The Maldives, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Samoa, Nauru, and other nations throughout Oceania were losing territory — and lives — by the minute.
But the biggest numbers of victims might yet hail from the biggest names in cities: New Orleans, which looked as if Hurricane Katrina had returned on steroids; New York, where subway trains had been caught in flooded tunnels, killing more than one thousand passengers; Los Angeles, where famed beach communities had been obliterated; Tokyo, where trampling killed hundreds; and Amsterdam, where even centuries of living below sea level could scarcely prepare the populace for such a swift onslaught of the ocean. The compounding tragedies also included Mumbai, Shanghai, Singapore, Jakarta, and Dhaka. Water treatment plants were flooded; basic sanitation had washed away with the floods; diseases, such as dysentery, were predicted to become epidemic; and widespread starvation was expected within days.
In the U.S., Miami was a worst-case scenario all on its own — possibly in a literal sense: Southeast Florida was among the most imperiled places on the planet, and if the waters kept rising, Miami would be cut off from mainland America within two weeks. It was not hard to imagine that in the next century its famed high-rises would form coral reefs as dead as so many of nature’s had already become.
Traffic on I-95 and I-75, heading north out of Florida, was choked by vehicles that had run out of fuel. Truck stops had shut down, only to be looted by motorists, including armed families, desperate for food and water and nonexistent gasoline. Shopping centers throughout the Sunshine State were ablaze, a fast-moving phenomenon not confined to Florida cities. It was as if arsonists were trying to fight floods with fire.
The mayhem was almost incomprehensible, and yet it made perfect sense to Lana. The world as people had known it all their lives was ending.
Meetings of every conceivable government agency remotely related to climate change, emergency services, and the nation’s security were underway, but as Holmes had confided to his closest aides only hours ago, “It mostly comes down to what we can do to stop these madmen.” Tellingly, his eyes had landed on Lana.
What her eyes could not avoid taking in now was the video once more feeding from the Delphin. The ghostly interior of the submarine, strewn with dead bodies, now looked like a preview of what the hackers had planned for the rest of the world.
This is how we got started, she imagined one of them saying, but soon this will be everywhere.