The surge was so powerful that it didn’t pause when it hit nor slow as it drove over the town, leveling everything in its path. It raged up the shore, snapping trees like matchsticks and ripping buildings from their foundations. The rubble was tossed a mile into the foothills. The wave destroyed two hundred years of careful colonial rule and hundreds of acres of cultivated land. It flattened some hills and built new ones with the rubble. It disinterred countless coffins from the Dutch cemetery and spilled their grisly contents into the bay. It wiped five thousand people off the face of the earth.
Like a demon claiming its prize, the receding wave seized nearly all evidence that the town had ever existed and dragged it into the sea. All except the Berouw. The little gunboat was left stranded two miles from shore along the bank of a river.
Because there was no hope of survivors in town, Captain Lindemann decided his duty lay in returning to Anjer so he could report the calamity. The ship plodded out of Lampong Bay, cutting through a carpet of ash, torn trees, the remnants of huts and thousands of mutilated corpses.
The eruption had whipped the winds to a hurricane pitch, and the ashfall became so severe that Lindemann ordered the soldiers and their prisoners to the deck to help keep the Loudon from foundering under its weight. A miserable rain soon started to fall, mixing with the ash so that large clots of mud pummeled the ship. Soon strings of gray ooze hung from the rigging and drooled from the scuppers. The Loudon resembled a ghost ship adorned with tattered funeral shrouds.
When the first bolt of lightning struck, it jumped across the rigging as it sought ground, splitting into fingers of blue fire that blew mud from the ship like shrapnel. The native prisoners screamed in terror as a ball of St. Elmo’s fire danced over their heads. The felons were still chained in groups of ten. An arc of electricity coursed through the shackles of one group, killing two men outright and burning the other eight so severely that none would survive the hour.
By ten thirty in the morning, daylight was gone and the deck was buried under two feet of muddy soot despite the best efforts of the passengers and crew. They worked under the driving rain while dodging chunks of pumice that continued to shoot from the sky.
At noon, the sea was too rough for work. Lindemann ordered everyone belowdecks and the hatches secured. He would have to risk capsizing under the load of ash. He had himself lashed to the ship’s wheel and the chief engineer secured to his station.
The Loudon slowly emerged from Lampong Bay like an icebreaker cleaving pack ice. At the head of the bay, the crust of ash was seven feet thick, too much for the ship’s overworked boiler. She could barely make headway and the captain feared she’d sink if she stopped.
They retreated west around Sebesi Island to circle far around the still-erupting volcano. And for the next eighteen hours, the plucky steamer fought the waves and wind, the rippling tsunamis that continued to radiate from the epicenter, and the ash that didn’t so much as fall from the sky but seemed launched directly at the ship.
The sun remained hidden by a pall of soot. The darkness was more complete than any night, darker than any cave. It was as if Monday, August 27, 1883, never came to the Sunda Strait.
Six more times the ship was struck by lightning, and once more she would battle a killer wave as Krakatoa erupted the last time. That final collapse of the caldera was the weakened rock at the rim of the volcano plummeting into the half-mile-deep crater, finally sealing the aperture into the earth’s heart.
The day before it had taken the Loudon four hours to travel from Anjer to Telok Betong. The return trip took twenty. Approaching the Java coast south of Anjer, the steamer ran parallel to the shore amid a sea of flotsam — ash, ripped-up trees and more bodies than anyone could count. The coast, once verdant jungle and productive plantations, resembled a desert. The scattering of villages had all been wiped away and those few survivors had yet to return from the hills where they’d fled.
If anything the damage to Java was worse than what they had witnessed on Sumatra. The city of Anjer, home to ten thousand people, was gone.
Han wrote furiously in his journal as the ship plowed through the morass. Wherever he looked, bodies poked through the undulating blanket of ash, most stripped naked by the tsunami, some burned horribly by the near-molten pumice.
The only thing keeping him from being driven mad was the physical act of writing. His quill flew across the pages as if the speed of his hand would allow the image to flow from his eyes to the page and not seep into his memory. Yet when he closed his eyes the glistening wall of water hovered in his consciousness, poised to overwhelm him.
Han had never seen the oracle himself — that honor was reserved for the high priests — so he didn’t know how such an accurate prediction as this could have been made. Some of the retired watchers said the oracle was a woman rumored to be two hundred years old. Others speculated that the oracle was an intricate machine that could detect the earth’s faintest tremble. Priests somehow interpreted this information to foretell the future. Still others believed it was a gift of prophecy bestowed on a succession of children, like the reincarnated spirit of a lama.
Han didn’t care to know the truth. He had witnessed the oracle’s precision and would never do so again. He understood human nature enough to know that even if he had warned the inhabitants of the Sunda Strait only a handful of people would have been able to save themselves. Still, the burden of seeing the death and destruction was too much. He would let some other watcher complete the journal he carried.
It was titled Pacific Basin 1850–1910. Understanding that the oracle foretold this cataclysm thirty-plus years ago sent a chill through Han’s body worse than the deepest frost of winter. He prayed this was an aberration, that the oracle had been right just this one time. It had just been his bad luck. That was all. The next prophecy would doubtless be wrong. It had to be. Nothing could predict calamity.
In the front of the ledger were a series of letters sealed in wax. Nine of the ten envelopes had been opened; he had opened the latest one when he left for Batavia four months ago. That meant there was one more great disaster coming in the next twenty-three years.
He was prohibited from breaking the wax seals that hid the time and location of the next disaster. Watchers only opened the envelopes for the events they themselves were to witness. The last envelope was to be opened on January 1, 1906, which would presumably give a future watcher enough time to reach his destination. With a jerk Han snapped the wax seal and read the yellowed text.
The date was meaningless. Just a day, a month, and a year. April 18, 1906. The coordinates meant nothing either. More numbers. But some resourceful cartographer had written in the name of the town that stood at the epicenter of what would be one of the worst earthquakes in history: a city called San Francisco, California.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA THE PRESENT
Mercer woke with one thought on his mind. Seven uninterrupted days. He’d been working without a break for six and a half weeks. And in the past seven months he’d managed just one four-day weekend and a few stray days to himself. This was going to be his first real vacation in over a year. His second thought was that when it was over, he’d be returning to the Canadian Arctic, where he’d spent the past month and a half. He was facing at least another four weeks at an isolated mining camp thirteen hundred miles north of Montana. De Beers was looking to invest a further half billion dollars in the newly discovered diamond fields and was waiting for Mercer’s final test results and geologic report.