Hundreds of people perished in their beds while still asleep. Many were terribly gashed by flying glass or crushed by pancaked ceilings. Early-morning workers and pedestrians were picked up off their feet and crushed against buildings.
The shock wave struck the city with twice the force of any recorded hurricane, flattening wooden structures near the shore as though they were paper toys, collapsing storefronts, shattering a hundred thousand windows, and hurling parked automobiles into buildings.
Inside the harbor the monstrous Ozero Baykai went up.
At first, flames shot from her hull like blowtorches. Then the whole oil tanker burst open in a giant fireball. A surge of flaming oil swamped the surrounding waterfront structures and launched a chain reaction of explosions from combustible cargoes sitting on the docks. Fiery metal plunged into oil and gas storage tanks on the east side of the harbor. One after another they blew up like a time-sequence fireworks display, spewing gigantic black smoke clouds over the city.
An oil refinery exploded, then a chemical company blew, followed by blasts at a paint company and fertilizer plant. Two nearby freighters, under way and heading for sea, collided, caught fire, and began to blaze. A fiery hunk of steel from the destroyed tanker plummeted into one of ten railroad tank cars containing propane and sent them up like a string of firecrackers.
Another blast. . . then another. . . and another.
Four miles of waterfront were turned into a holocaust. Ashes and soot covered the city like a black snowfall. Few stevedores working the docks survived. Fortunately, the refineries and the chemical plant were nearly abandoned. Loss of life would have been many times higher if it had not been a national holiday.
The worst of the disaster inside the harbor was past, but the nightmare still facing the rest of the city had yet to arrive.
An immense fifty-foot tidal wave rose up out of the vortex and hurtled toward shore. Pitt and the others stared in awe as the green and white mountain roared after them. They sat there waiting, no panic, just staring and waiting for the frail little launch to become a shattered piece of wreckage and the water their tomb.
The seawall along the Malecon was only thirty yards away when the horizontal avalanche engulfed the launch. The crest curled and burst right over them. It tore Manny and three men from their seats, and Pitt watched them sail through the crashing spray like roof shingles in a tornado. The seawall rushed closer but the momentum of the wave lifted the launch over the top and slung it across the wide boulevard.
Pitt clutched the helm with such strength that it was torn away from its mounting and he was swept clear. He thought this was the end, but with a conscious effort of will he took a deep breath and held it as he was pulled under. As if in a dream he could look down through the strangely clear and demoniac water, seeing cars tumbling in crazy gyrations as if thrown by a giant hand.
Buried deep in the boiling turmoil, he felt strangely detached. It struck him as ludicrous that he was about to drown on a city street. His desire for life still clung tenaciously, but he did not struggle senselessly and waste precious oxygen. He went lax and vainly tried to peer through the froth, his mind somehow working with uncanny clarity. He knew that if the wave swept him against a concrete building the rushing tons of water would mash him into the same consistency as a watermelon dropped from an airplane.
His fear would have been heightened if he had seen the launch smash into the second story of an apartment building that housed Soviet technicians. The impact collapsed the hull as if the planking were no stronger than an eggshell. The four-cylinder diesel engine was tossed through a broken window by the cascade and ended up in a stairwell.
Mercifully, Pitt was swept into a narrow side street like a log through a chute. The flood carried everything before it in a great tumbling mass of wreckage. But even as it curled around the buildings strong enough to withstand the onslaught, the wave was already beginning to die. Within seconds the leading edge would reach its high mark and then recede, the retreating torrent sucking human bodies and loose debris back to the sea.
Pitt began to see stars as his brain starved for oxygen. His senses began to shut down one by one. He felt a jarring blow as his shoulder struck a fixed object. He whipped an arm around it, trying to hang on, but he was thrust forward by the force of the wave. He ran into another flat surface, and this time he reached out and clutched it in a death grip, not recognizing it as a sign over a jeweler's shop.
The thinking, feeling equipment of his body slowed and shut down as if its electrical current had switched off. His head was pounding and blackness was covering the stars bursting behind his eyes. He existed only on instinct, and soon even that would desert him.
The wave had reached its outer limit and began to fall in on itself, rushing back to the sea. It was too late for Pitt, he was slipping away from consciousness. His brain somehow managed to send out one last message. An arm clumsily jammed its way between the sign and its support shaft that protruded from the building, and wedged there.
Then his bursting lungs could take no more, and he began to drown.
The great rumble from the explosions echoed away into the hills and sea. There was no sunlight over the city, no real sunlight. It was hidden by a smoke-blackened pall of incredible density. The whole harbor seemed afire-- the docks, ships, storage tanks, and three square miles of oil-coated water were bristling with orange and blue flame that streaked up into the dark canopy.
The dreadfully wounded city began to shake off the shock and stagger to its feet. Sirens began to match the noisy intensity of the crackling fires. The tidal wave had flowed back into the Gulf of Mexico, dragging a great mass of splintered debris and bodies in its wake.
Survivors began to stumble dazed and injured into the streets, like bewildered sheep, shocked at the enormous devastation around them, wondering what had happened. Some wandered in shock, unfeeling of their wounds. Others stared dumbly at the huge piece of the Amy Bigalow's rudder that had crashed through the bus station and mashed four of the vehicles and several people who were waiting to board.
A piece of the Ozero Zaysan's forward mast was found embedded in the center of Havana Stadium's soccer field. A one-ton winch landed in a wing of University Hospital and squashed the only three beds not occupied in a forty-bed ward. It was to be widely talked about as only one of a hundred miracles that happened that day. A great boon to the Catholic Church and a small setback to Marxism.
Rescue parties began to form as firefighters and police converged on the waterfront. Army units were called out along with the militia. There was panic amid the chaos at first. The military forces turned their backs on rescue work and manned island defenses under the mistaken belief the United States was invading. The injured seemed to be everywhere, some screaming in pain, most hobbling or walking away from the flaming harbor.
The earthshaking quake died with the shock waves. The ceiling of Sloppy Joe's had fallen in, but the walls still stood. The barroom was a shambles. Wooden beams, fallen plaster, overturned furniture, and broken bottles lay scattered under a thick cloud of dust. The swinging door had been ripped from its hinges and hung at a crazy angle over Castro's bodyguards, who lay groaning under a small hill of bricks.
Ira Hagen hoisted himself painfully to his feet and shook his head to clear it from the ringing of the concussion. He wiped his eyes to penetrate the dust cloud and clutched a wall for support. He looked up through the now open ceiling and saw pictures still hanging on the walls of the floor above.