“Yes, sir.” The subaltern saluted.
“Ping, escort the passenger back to the forecastle and get yourself busy on the bridge glass.”
Han paused at the hatchway coaming. Captain Lindemann was looking at him oddly. The big Dutchman nodded his head, as if to say the warning was just the last nudge he needed to enact the plan he’d already been contemplating.
The chorus of frightened cries from the enclosed forecastle masked the sound of the heavy anchor chains grinding up the hawsepipe while ash obscured the thick smoke pumping from the Loudon’s squat funnel. The man who called himself Han waited at the ship’s rail to see if the nearby gunboat would reply to Captain Lindemann’s warning. He was unable to spot the small craft in the darkness, nor could he see the flash of her signal lamp. In fact, the beam from the Loudon’s light couldn’t cut more than a few dozen yards into the swirling storm of ash.
A few minutes later, the steamship began to swing around in a wide arc, her rigging creaking against the wind while her boiler kept the bronze prop thrashing the ash-choked water.
For the rest of the night the Loudon held station two miles from the town, where the chart said she had seventy feet of water under her keel. She rattled against her anchor chain while the engine-room crew fed coal into her boilers to keep up the steam. The winds were increasing by the minute, stripping the top layer of ash from the sea like desert sand blown from a dune.
Dawn arrived as a weak wash of light obscured by a raging maelstrom of soot and ash. Han had spent a miserable night huddled with the terrified prisoners and their equally frightened Dutch guards. The Europeans in the first-class cabins in the midships superstructure couldn’t have fared much better than the mass of humanity in the forward spaces. Four times during the night massive waves passed under the Loudon, lifting her so savagely that those not holding on to a bulkhead floated in space when she dropped abruptly into the trough.
Even the washed-out dawn and sulfur-leaden air was a relief from the claustrophobic confines of the forecastle, which reeked of vomit and loose bowels.
The watcher was the first passenger on deck and he noticed immediately that the temperature had dropped more than twenty degrees from the previous day. Captain Lindemann stood on the small wing jutting off the bridge, a long spyglass to his eye. Han had been given a smaller collapsible telescope and retrieved it from his bag, paying no heed to the six-inch layer of hot ash that slowly cooked his feet. He peered through the glass in the direction Lindemann was looking.
At first he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. And then the image became clear. The side-wheeler Berouw was no longer at her anchorage. She was gone. Han scanned the quiet town of Telok Betong. A layer of soot covered everything, dulling the buildings to a uniform gray as lifeless as the surface of the moon. Many of the natives’ huts on the outskirts of town had toppled under the weight of ash. Only a few ragged figures lurched through the ruins.
Panning the spyglass across the once-thriving water-front, Han found the gunboat and his hands began to tremble. He turned back to see the captain had been watching him looking at the town. Their eyes locked, assuring each other that they had seen the same thing.
At the end of a street Han didn’t recall from his previous visits sat the Berouw. What Han had thought was a street was in fact the path the thousand-ton ship had plowed as the sea heaved it inland. A dozen stone buildings had been flattened by the tumbling vessel. Countless more rattan and thatch huts were destroyed. The tidal waves’ equally fearsome withdrawal had scoured away the debris, including the dead.
Han plunged his hand into his pocket for his watch. From numerous readings of his journal he knew that the mountain would erupt again very soon. The original journal entries were written in an archaic language the watcher couldn’t decipher, but translations had been inked into the margins, detailing the exact location and time. Comparing his watch to the journal and factoring how long it would take the noise of the eruption to reach the bay, Han saw he had a few more minutes. He prayed that somehow the oracle would be wrong.
He steadied the book against the railing and retrieved a calligrapher’s inkpot and a quill from his bag. The scribes in Tibet had given the geographic location of the island: six degrees ten seconds south by one hundred and five degrees forty-two seconds east. What they couldn’t possibly have known when they wrote the tome so long ago was the local name of the mountain. He took a moment to write it in now.
Krakatoa.
The smaller eruption the day before had thrown nine cubic miles of ash into the air and undermined a subterranean dome. The dome finally collapsed at a little past seven on the morning of the twenty-seventh in a titanic avalanche of rock and sea. The thermal shock of billions of tons of water vaporizing against the magma below the dome split the air in a crack that could be heard in Australia, two thousand miles away. The sound was the loudest heard in human history. Six-hundred-ton boulders were thrown forty miles or more, burning missiles that caused forest fires that would rage for days. The catastrophic eruption threw a fresh column of ash and debris into the upper atmosphere that would eventually envelop the earth. Average temperatures in Europe and America would plunge five degrees for the next several years. The concussion wave would circle the globe seven times before finally dissipating.
Although the term would not be coined for several decades, the force of the eruption would measure in the thousands of megatons. The island of Krakatoa was split into three pieces and parts of it were obliterated altogether.
As furious as the eruption was, it wasn’t what would kill the thirty-six thousand victims of the disaster. What took them lurked moments behind the shock wave and traveled at half the speed of sound.
For a full minute after the blast, the watcher remained on the decking where he’d been thrown. It had been like standing in the largest bell ever built while giants assaulted it with sledgehammers. He could see crewmen frantically hoisting the anchor, but their voices were lost in the ringing that echoed in his head. The vibration of the Loudon’s engine blurred with the palsylike trembling in his limbs.
He knew that when the tsunami struck the ship, no place would be safe. Either all would die or all would survive, so he remained on deck to await the wave’s attack down Lampong Bay. The horizon had been sliced in two by the ash cloud, but soon another phenomenon began to blur the line between sea and sky.
The tsunami raced at the vessel at three hundred miles per hour and grew in height as it roared up the shallows. From a small hump far in the distance, the wave piled on itself, growing like a snake rearing its head, its crest frothing while still a mile away. The sound was a thousand cyclones confined in Han’s skull.
At the last moment, his courage failed him. He dashed into the superstructure as the Loudon was lifted thirty feet up the wave’s leading edge. It was as if the ship had been thrown vertical. And just as quickly the wave passed under the steamer and she dropped straight down, her keel flexing like a bow. She buried her prow in the trough and would have gone under had the captain not put on a burst of speed to meet the monster head-on.
Once again the watcher picked himself up from where he’d been tossed and staggered out to see the wave continuing its relentless journey.
The wall of water was thirty feet tall when it passed under the Loudon and had doubled by the time Han reached the rail. It doubled again in the last seconds before it struck land, forced ever higher by the sloping beach. From Han’s vantage it seemed the tsunami had already swallowed the land. In the seconds before it toppled, the wave completely hid the hills behind Telok Betong.