Meanwhile, the fishermen and their families were being ferried on to the mainland, where relatives, friends, and volunteers were lined in packed parking lots, waiting to drive them to safety. Maine is a tight-knit, insular community off-season, with fewer than one million residents. At a time like this, they were all brothers and sisters.
In far, far greater danger was Provincetown, the outermost town on Cape Cod, 120 miles to the south across the Gulf of Maine. This small artistic community, set in the huge left-hand sweep of the Cape, is protected strictly by low sand dunes and grass. By that Monday afternoon, it was a ghost town. Those who could, towed their boats down the mid-Cape highway and onto the mainland. The rest just hit the road west and hoped their homes and boats would somehow survive. Lloyds of London was not hugely looking forward to future correspondence with regard to Cape Cod.
All along the narrow land, every resident had to leave. Massachusetts State Police were already supervising the evacuation. All roads leading from all the little cape towns to Route 6A were designated one-way systems — Wellfleet, Truro, Orleans, Chatham, Brewster, Denisport, Yarmouth, Hyannis, Osterville, Cotuit, and Falmouth. No one was to come back until the danger had cleared.
The evacuation, all the way down that historic coastline, was total. The whaling port of New Bedford was deserted by Monday evening, and the flat eastern lowlands of Rhode Island, a myriad of bay shores and islands, were going to be a write-off, if Admiral Badr’s missiles made it to the volcano.
In the shadow of the towering edifice of Newport Bridge, the little sailing town was on the verge of a collective nervous breakdown. Some of the most expensive yachts ever built were home here for the autumn, and many of them had not yet been hauled or had not yet departed for the Caribbean or Florida.
The New York Yacht Club’s headquarters, gazing out onto the harbor, would probably be the first to go if the tidal wave came rolling in past Brenton Point. Offshore, Block Island had been evacuated completely by Sunday night, and whether Newport Bridge itself could survive was touch-and-go.
Farther up the coast, there were obvious areas of impending disaster in the long, narrow New England state of Connecticut. The shoreline was beset by wealthy little seaports, the closer they were to New York, the more plutocratic. Bridgeport, Norwalk, Stamford, Darien, and Greenwich — Connecticut’s Golden Suburbs, all along the narrowing waters of Long Island Sound. Billions of dollars’ worth of manicured property and people, all hoping against hope that central Long Island itself, around 15 miles wide, would bear the brunt of the tsunami.
But it was the northern seaport of New London that was causing the most concern in the state of Connecticut. This is one of the United States Navy’s great submarine bases, and home of the Electric Boat Company, which builds them. It is a traditional Navy town, and there had been ferocious activity since before the weekend, all along the jetties, preparing the big nuclear boats to make all speed south to the west coast of Florida. Unfinished ships were being towed 10 miles upriver — anywhere that might be beyond the reach of the tsunami after it hit the helpless north shore of Long Island Sound.
South of New York, the flat sweep of the Jersey shore, with its miles and miles of vacation homes, was defenseless. So was the entire eastern shore of Maryland, which was nothing but a flat coastal plain on both sides of the Chesapeake Estuary, with no elevation higher than 100 feet and nothing to stop the thunderous tidal wave but the flimsiest of outer islands, not much higher than sand bars beyond the long waters of Chincoteague Bay.
By Monday afternoon, the entire area was almost deserted, hundreds of cars still heading north, joined by another huge convoy from neighboring Delaware, which shared the same long shoreline and was equally defenseless.
South of Virginia, the coastal plain of North Carolina was, if anything, even more vulnerable than Maryland. The Tidewater area was flat, poorly drained, and marshy, meandering out to a chain of low barrier islands — the Outer Banks — separated from the mainland by lagoons and salt marshes. Out on the peninsula of Beaufort, Pamlico, and Cateret Counties, which lie between the two wide rivers the Neuse and the Pamlico, the issue was not whether the giant tsunami would hit and flood, but whether the little seaports would ever stick their heads above the Atlantic again.
Myrtle Beach Air Force Station, right on the coast of South Carolina, was playing a huge role in the evacuation of the coastal region, with a fleet of helicopters in the skies assisting the police with traffic. Hundreds of Air Force personnel were helping evacuate the beautiful city of Charleston, one of the most historic ports in the United States and home of Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began.
Right on the border lies the oldest city in Georgia, the port of Savannah. There were 10,000 troops assisting in the evacuation there, and no one even dared think about the wreckage of this perfect colonial city, so carefully preserved over the centuries, yet so unprotected from the ravages of the ocean.
Florida was, of course, another story, with its 400-mile-long east coast open to the Atlantic, largely devoid of hills and of mountains, all the way south to Miami, Fernandina Beach in the north, then Jacksonville Beach, Daytona and Cocoa Beach, Indian Harbor, Vero Beach, Hobe Sound, Palm Beach, Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami.
Stretching out to the south were the low-lying resorts of the Florida Keys, all the way across the Everglades, right down to the yachtsmen’s paradise of Key West. Although every one of the Keys had borne the wrath of Atlantic hurricanes before, they hadn’t seen a tsunami since long before the Pharaohs ruled Egypt.
The East Coast of the U.S. was absolutely powerless in the face of such a threat. General Rashood had thought out and prepared his attack with immense skill, giving the U.S. population no option but to pack up and run, taking only what little they could carry.
Unless Adm. George Gillmore and his men could find that submarine.
12
Operation High Tide was one of the most complex and large cross-decking operations in recent memory. The Harry S. Truman stood a half-mile off the port bow of the Ronald Reagan, and it was pouring like the devil, a gusting sou’wester that swept sheets of rain across the carriers’ flight decks.
On paper, the preparations looked simple: to transfer fifty Sikorsky Seahawk helicopters from the deck of the Truman onto the deck of the Ronald Reagan. Trouble was, the deck of the Reagan was already full with the bigger part of its eighty-four embarked aircraft, most of them being flown by four of the most famous fighter squadrons in the United States Air Force.
The new F-14D Tomcat fighter bombers were controlled by the fabled fliers of the VF-2 Bounty Hunters. Three large groups of F/A 18C Hornets were flown by the VMFA 323 Death Rattlers, the VFA-151 Vigilantes, and the VFA-137 Kestrels. In addition, there were the Prowlers and the Vikings, but these were parked carefully away from the main runways.
And then there were the mighty E-2C Group II Hawkeyes, the biggest and most expensive aircraft on any carrier. The early-warning radar and control aircraft, the quarterback of the squadron, first to get in the air, and always parked right below the island, wings folded, ready to head for the stern catapult. No U.S. carrier would leave port without at least three onboard.
Aside from the Prowlers, Vikings, and Hawkeyes, the rest were ready for takeoff from the rainswept deck of their longtime home — the 100,000-ton Nimitz-class carrier, the Ronald Reagan.