A young second lieutenant, freckled and sunburned, was waiting for him. He escorted Allison to a small dining room on the second floor, overlooking a stand of eucalyptus and a woebegone flowerbed. General Ernest Miles was already there, looking out the rain-streaked windows. His eyes were brilliantly blue, his square face deeply tanned. Allison found himself standing straighten “Hello, General. Hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”
“No, just got here myself. I’m drinking Perrier, but help yourself to whatever you like.” Miles waved a thick hand towards the bar in the corner.
They settled companionably in easy chairs by the windows, reminiscing about the filming of Gunship two years before. Miles had been the commanding officer at Fort Polk, Louisiana, where they’d done the location shooting, and he had helped a lot. Allison privately suspected that Miles’s transfer to Ord was largely due to the success of Gunship, which among other things had been a terrific recruiting film.
Waiters brought lunch; Allison and Miles moved to the table across the room.
“Good salad,” Allison remarked.
“Hothouse lettuce. Can you believe it? Here we are in the middle of some of the finest farm country in the world, but they have to grow lettuce under glass.” Miles regarded his plate with a kind of perplexed regret. “God knows where this will all end up. Ozone, flares, UV, weird weather—” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe what we’re contending with.”
Uh-oh, thought Allison. “Well, you seem to be coping pretty damn well, General. The troops here look sharp.”
“It’s communications that’s killing us, Bob. Every time one of those solar flares goes off, we get an instant power surge that blows hell out of microchip circuits. Knocks out computers, telecommunications, missile electronics, the works. Knocks out all our satellites as well. Washington is putting in fibre-optic cables as fast as possible, and they’ll help some, but it’ll be — oh, a couple of years before we’re back to an adequate communications capability. The Russians could invade Germany tonight and we wouldn’t know about it until next Tuesday.”
“At least the Reds have the same problems, right?”
The general’s grin returned. “Worse. We hear rumours that a couple of their missiles have blown up in their silos due to electronic malfunction.”
“They didn’t—?”
“Not nuclear explosions, no. But they showed that the Reds can’t trust their hardware. We can’t either.”
“Should I even be hearing this?”
“It’s common knowledge, Bob. These damn flares have the upper atmosphere all churned up. Launch a missile, you can’t tell if it’ll come close enough to its target to take it out.
“Are you telling me World War Three’s been postponed because of the weather?”
Both men laughed and turned their attention to lunch. But within a minute or two Miles was brooding again about his troubles.
“The kids in basic training are taking it hard. At least the whites and Chicanos. They’re mostly farm boys, small town boys, they worry when they see what the UV is doing to the land. Then Mama writes a letter about how all the horses went blind and had to be shot — boy, you got a kid with a problem.
“What about the blacks?”
“Thank the good lord for those boys. They can take a dose of UV that would fry an egg, and they’re city kids — they don’t know what colour grass is supposed to be. Except maybe the kind they smoke. We’d be out of business without ‘em. You know, they’re actually getting a kick out of all this.”
“A kick?”
“Sure. The rest of us can’t go outside without gloves and all that crud on our faces, except at night. The black boys think it’s funnier’n hell. Well, I guess it is. We got the world’s first indoor army.”
Allison saw the chance to make his move. He raised his glass of Perrier: “Here’s hoping the ozone will be back by June, or I’ll have to shoot The Longrangers in a studio.”
“Ah! Tell me about it.”
Allison launched into his spiel, knowing Miles would be interested and sympathetic; the general had commanded long-range reconnaissance and patrol outfits in Vietnam. The pitch was going well, and Miles was nodding enthusiastically, when a stocky, red-faced captain burst in.
“Sir — sorry to disturb you, but we’ve got an urgent message from the Presidio in San Francisco. Uh, some kind of tidal waves are coming up the coast. They say San Diego and L.A. got clobbered, and Vandenberg—” He stopped himself, looking suspiciously at Allison.
“Spit it out, Captain.”
“Vandenberg Air Force Base reports heavy casualties and extensive damage. They expect the waves to reach the Monterey area about twelve-twenty. That’s ah, twelve minutes from now. sir.”
The general looked more annoyed than alarmed. “Okay. I don’t think this will amount to much, but evacuate the firing ranges at once, and the dependents’ quarters within half a mile of Highway One. Get everyone moved east of North-South Road. Notify the hospital, fire services and MPs. And get me a chopper out in front of this place by twelve-fifteen.”
“Yes, sir!” The captain vanished, leaving the door ajar; the hum from the main dining room, downstairs, seemed to change pitch.
Miles rose from the table. “Well, Bob, looks like we’ll have to get together another time real soon. Sorry about this. I don’t think we’ll have any real trouble, but no sense taking chances. Boy — if Vandenberg got flooded, they must be some big waves.”
The general was already halfway to the door. “Remember me to that lovely wife of yours.”
— Oh Christ, thought Allison, she’s in Carmel.
Allison followed Miles out and raced to his car. Just as he was unlocking it, the fort’s PA system thundered into life: loud-speakers bawled unintelligibly, the noise blurring into echoes. Sirens moaned. Allison backed out of the parking slot and roared onto the street.
The main exits would be jammed with trainees from the rifle ranges pouring across Highway 1. He’d do better taking North-South Road and coming out at the southwest corner of the fort.
Once past the dependents’ housing, Allison met little traffic, and soon reached Highway 218. He used a roundabout route to get back onto Highway 1 on the south side of Monterey; Carmel was only four or five miles farther on. He drove fast, splashing through flooded stretches of the road.
Belatedly, Allison turned on the car radio and tried to get KMPX, but it was off the air. He tried 640, the emergency frequency, but heard only a high-pitched whine. He switched off, swearing.
Sirens were screaming as he neared the junction with Highway 1: ambulances and police cars blocked off the streets leading down to the water. Even without radio, word had travelled fast in Monterey. Cars were almost bumper-to-bumper, heading for the high ground on the road to Carmel.
— Why was the engine running so loudly? He downshifted into second; the noise was louder. It wasn’t the car. The whirring, rasping roar was coming from the north, from the waterfront.
The roar ended suddenly with a single sharp boom; the Mercedes shuddered as the pavement thumped beneath it. What sounded like machine-gun fire followed almost at once. Crossing Pacific, Allison got a clear look down to the waterfront.
It was gone. A black-and-white wall of water stood where the beach and wharves had been. The crest of the wave was level with the roof of a four-story building, which exploded when the water struck it.
A long tentacle from the wave shot up Pacific, a white mass twenty feet high and moving fast. It overtook a yellow Datsun station wagon, flipped it over, and engulfed it. The front of the tentacle was armoured in debris — boats, trees, fragmented walls, chunks of concrete, a long black shaft that must have been a piling from one of the piers.