Dead Reckoning

TOM WRIGHT

DEAD RECKONING

This book is a work of fiction. While some
of the characters are based on persons or composites of persons known by the author, their characteristics, attitudes, beliefs, and actions are creations of the imagination of the author to fit a purpose within the novel and should not be construed as real. Most of the locations are real or based on real locations. Any other resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Tom Wright

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Visit http://www.WhoIsTomWright.com to contact author.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN
978-1482346169

FOR CINDY, CODY, AND KATIE.

ACKNO
WLEDGEMENTS

I would like to specifically thank David Seelye, Mike Lundberg, and Trace Fleming, for without the three of you and the long conversations on my deck and at Emon Beach, Dead Reckoning might have never happened.

Others who contributed or otherwise helped in some way as
the idea for this book hatched: Jane Seelye, Shaunna Neustel Fleming, and Julie Lundberg.

My first editor, Jennifer Provo Joyner, without whom I would have never found Sarah Cypher who helped me turn Dead Reckoning into something much better.

Many thanks go out to my friend and editor, Jennifer Myers Hammer, who found most of those elusive errors to which I had become oblivious.

Finally, thanks to those people who pointed out issues in the first
print and made the second print that much closer to perfection. Specifically, thank you to Valerie McGrath who went through the whole thing and Dan Weygand who helped me toughen Matt up a bit.

The f
ront cover photo is called “Sailing from the Storm” and was generously contributed by:

Jim Mandeville

Director of Photography

The Nicklaus Companies

Photo copyright © 2009 Jim Mandeville, all rights reserved.

THE END

It took less than two weeks for our entire civilization to collapse. Every life on this planet changed forever. This is how I remember it.

1

2:34 AM
, SUNDAY, MAY 27TH – KWAJALEIN, MARSHALL ISLANDS

Slivers of moonlight knifed between the window sill and shade, pierced the ink-black night, and scattered faintly across my room. I felt watched—not alone—and my skin prickled with goose flesh.

I eased carefully out of bed and grabbed the window shade. It slipped from my hand, accelerated upward, and crashed into the top of the windowsill. It flapped around several times before slowing to a rest. I jumped from having given myself away.

Moonlight flooded the room, and I turned and saw nothing. The room changed from hot to cold in an instant; my breath appeared before me. I began to hyperventilate and the frigid air hurt my teeth.

Startled by a ringing sound, I turned and saw my children standing in the distance stolidly ringing bells. I started toward them, but the faster I moved, the further away they got. A telephone appeared before me. I lifted the receiver and said hello, but no one responded. The phone continued to ring as I held the receiver and looked at it.

Suddenly, I found myself rising through the air, as if coming up from some great depth. The ringing grew louder and closer as I approached the top.

When I reached the top, I opened my eyes. My heart thumped like a pounding fist, and the hairs on my clammy skin stood erect. I rolled over to look at the clock, and the wet sheets peeled away from my skin.

             
The telephone gave me a start when it rang again—twice in quick succession, signifying an off-island call coming in. As I reached for the phone, I looked again at the clock and the blood-red numbers read: 2:34. Panic returned. There was only one reason Kate would wake me in the middle of the night: something was wrong.

I lifted the receiver and said: “hello.”

“Have you been watching the news?” Kate said with alarm in her voice.

I tensed as I rolled back onto the uncomfortably cool, damp sheets.

“What?” I asked.

“The news. Are you watching it?”

“It’s two-thirty in the morning. Why would I be watching TV?”

I upset the order of my nightstand in an overaggressive reach and sent the remote to the floor. I righted the lamp and adjusted the clock to its proper angle before retrieving the remote. I switched on the television and waited for my eyes to adjust.

When the screen came into focus, it was tuned to what we called “the roller,” or a channel displaying a series of informational slides about activities around USAKA. USAKA stood for United States Army Kwajalein Atoll which was home to Reagan Test Site (abbreviated RTS), a missile testing site in the Marshall Islands, about half-way between Hawaii and Australia. It was also our home and had been for seven years.

I quickly switched to the other channel (we had only two) and found a replay of a baseball game I’d seen the previous night. It was my beloved Seattle Mariners, but I felt irritated not to have a news channel when something was going on.

“All I’ve got is baseball and the roller,” I said.

I heard Kate’s sigh all the way from Seattle where she and our three children were visiting her parents. “It’s
The Red Plague. It’s gone nuts.”

The media had been hungrily covering an outbreak of a new virus for about a week—
The Red Plague, they called it. It was some kind of hemorrhagic virus—very lethal and very contagious, but so far, no one had been infected outside of Florida where it started. And Florida was quarantined. Of course, it was all they could talk about though.

“You know how they are, if it bleeds it leads,” I said. “Has it popped up somewhere else?”

“It’s worse than that. It’s everywhere.”

As a lawyer, Kate was quick, hard-nosed, and a great debater, but also prone to exaggeration. Being a scientist
, I preferred rational analysis to emotion.

“It can’t be
everywhere
,” I said. “You don’t have it.”

“Cases exploded overnight,” she replied. “And now it’s in Texas, California, Asia, and maybe even Europe. They think it was engineered by terrorists, and the president is already saber-rattling over it. I was watching Fox News and,”

“Stop watching Fox News,” I interrupted.

She continued with barely a pause. “And it has an incubation period of up to a week. We could all have it and not even know it.”

“I told you, it will be fine. Just stay at your mom’s house and don’t go out—any of you. Don’t come in contact with people. Just lay low and wait for it to blow over.”

“They’re already talking about shutting down air travel. I think we should come home.”

“Get on a plane?” I said. “There is a reason they’re thinking about shutting down air travel. If you want The Red Plague, there’s no better place than on a plane.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do?”

“Just lay low. The virus doesn’t walk through walls.”

“What if the shit hits the fan?”

We had talked about that before. Kate and the kids spent the entire summer back in the states almost every year. I usually got a few weeks off, but we often wondered what we would do if separated by 5,000 miles of ocean in a crisis scenario.

“It can’t be that bad,” I said.

“That’s easy for you to say. We’re here and you’re there, safe and secure.” 

That was true. In a global catastrophe of just about any kind imaginable, there would hardly have been a safer place than Kwajalein. Kwajalein was completely isolated from the outside with a buffer of thousands of miles of ocean in every direction and a comfortably warm, tropical climate. We were also fully self-sufficient with plenty of fish in the sea, coconuts and other crops on land, and probably lots of emergency food in a warehouse somewhere.

“If things get really bad, I’ll come over there,” I said. “Better just one of us on a plane than all four of you.”

“
If
you can,” she said pessimistically.

“Listen,” I said in an attempt to placate her. “If worse comes to worst, I will come over there. I promise.” I knew it would never come to that.

She said nothing, apparently intent on what she was watching.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I have to work early.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, knowing full well that I had a boat trip planned with my friends the next day.

I sat there for a few moments, just listening to her breath on the other end. Beautiful and intelligent beyond description, I often wondered by what karma I had been able to marry so far out of my league.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll let you go then. I love….”

The line went dead.

Those were the last words she ever said to me.

2

9:19 AM – KWAJALEIN, MARSHALL ISLANDS

As we screamed past a sailboat in our Boston Whaler, I watched a poor kid scramble to the port side of the sailboat and wretch into the sea. He spat into the water, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then slumped to the deck. His left arm flopped over the side, fingers skimming the glassy water with the relentless rocking of the boat.

A thought about The Red Plague arose from that place in my mind that I cannot control, but I overruled it. He was just sea sick. His parents came over to console him and offered him something – motion sickness pills, no doubt. It was way too late for that.

I can sympathize. I’ve only been motion sick twice in my life, both on a sailboat. Even a light wind creates a tremendous force against the sum of sail and hull, and when combined with an opposing current, the boat can rock in every direction at the same time. For
me — and apparently that boy, too — that is all it takes. No doubt he had found his spot for the rest of the trip.

My name is Matthew Anderssen. I was named after Saint Matthew of the Bible, a fact about which I have never been fond. I won’t answer to any name but Matt, so that’s what everyone calls me. I was the Chief Meteorologist for RTS, and I was stationed on Kwajalein (or Kwaj, as we called it), which is the main island in the ring of coral islands that make up Kwajalein Atoll.

My friends and I left the sailboat on our starboard side and made for Bigej (pronounced Bee Gee), another island within the atoll. We intended to spend a few hours there lounging in the bathwater-warm lagoon, snorkeling, swilling cold Corona, and then fishing down the east reef on the way back to Kwaj. It was a great way to spend a Sunday, the beginning of our weekend. At 167 degrees east longitude (13 degrees west of the dateline), we were nearly a full day ahead of the states, and we staggered our weekends to coincide with the stateside work week.

My friend Jeff Riggins skippered. As the Chief Information Officer for the range, he had a geeky, techno side, but he was not a typical computer nerd—he was just as comfortable with an outboard as a motherboard. As a master sailor and one of the few private sailboat owners at Kwaj, he was salty and rugged. Jeff was the kind of guy that could turn an already relaxing weekend boating trip into a day at the spa for the rest of us simply by being so knowledgeable and reliable. No matter what happened, he knew what to do and how to do it.

I watched Jeff as he piloted the boat, hoping to pick up on some of his techniques. His shoulder-length blonde hair whipped in the wind from under his backwards Milwaukee Brewers cap, and his sunglasses clung to the tip of his nose like bifocals. A loose tank top held firm against his chest while the remainder gathered downwind from him, snapping like a flapping flag. He was a touch taller than me, and he had a deep, dark tan from many hours at sea. I watched as he leaned forward to meet every wave and then back as we slid down into the trough; his body remained plumb the entire trip.

Jeff suddenly jerked the wheel to port and then back to starboard again. I snapped my head to starboard just in time to
see a sea turtle happily treading water as we whizzed by just a few feet to his port side. The turtle splashed frantically over the sudden, unexpected wave of our wake, then it paused and craned its neck to look. Seeing nothing, it continued on.

About fifteen minutes later, we entered Bigej Pass which connected Kwajalein Lagoon (the largest enclosed lagoon in the world) with the mighty Pacific Ocean. In the tropics the seasons were virtually indistinguishable from one another. There were no swings in temperature, only degrees of wetness and windiness. Kwaj was a place with sand as soft and white as baby powder
and where the coral-tinted water was such a beautiful shade of blue-green that a less than perfect person is apt to feel guilty merely for having set eyes upon it.

Given the light wind, the unusually large swells in the pass that day must have come from a distant storm. The long period of the swells made them easy to traverse, and without a chop from the wind, the ride through the pass was like a slow, gentle roller coaster—one that my kids surely would have enjoyed.

Bigej was our favorite place on the atoll. Just a forty-five minute boat ride from Kwaj, it was as remote as you could get. In contrast to the comparatively urban nature of Kwajalein Island, home to the world’s largest missile testing base, there was not a single structure on Bigej—hardly a sign that mankind had ever set foot there, just foliage, long sandy beaches, and a pristine turquoise-blue lagoon.

As we pulled up to our favorite snorkeling spot, we had already started rolling out every floating, lounging, and drinking conveyance known to man. We worked hard and played hard, and the money was good enough that we did not spare much expense on the playing part.

I was a little unsettled at the sight off to our east though. The weather forecast had called for mostly sunny skies, but I noticed the characteristic anvil-shaped tops of cumulonimbus clouds in the not-so-distant eastern sky. Where there are cumulonimbus there may be lightning, and if there is one thing to be feared on the water, it is lightning. Even a short person is the tallest thing around on a flat ocean, and lightning favors the tallest things. However, as always, the flies pestered us incessantly, so a quick shower would give us a little respite from the swatting.

O
ur party also included deputy police chief, Bill Callaway, a friend of Jeff’s named Ed, and a friend common to both Jeff and me, Sonny Sanders.

. . .

We were barely two beers in before the day started to turn sour. The menace in the eastern sky drew closer by the minute.

We piled back into the boat and Jeff radioed
Harbor Control to ask about the weather. They said they had been trying to contact us for fifteen minutes to inform us of a small craft advisory that had been issued. Jeff asked whether it would be safer to shelter in place or to run for home. Harbor Control told us to start for home. It should have taken forty-five minutes to get home, and according to them, the storm was an hour and a half out.

I sat next to Sonny and ate pistachio nuts while he drank Corona, an island favorite. I pried one open, flipped the shells overboard, and popped it into my mouth.

“You know,” I said to Sonny with a raised eyebrow that I knew he would correctly interpret, “You’ve reached a certain station in life when you are no longer willing to fight with closed pistachio nuts. I mean, when I was a poor college kid, I don’t know how many times I nearly cracked a tooth trying to get into those stubborn little bastards. And even the ones that are just barely cracked; why those things can cut you to the quick or fold over a fingernail if you’re not careful.”

Sonny carefully considered my comments, kneaded his thought for some time, and then finally deadpanned:

“Pistachios are a very dangerous nut.”

I nodded in agreement. “Yep, I’ll eat the easy ones, but if they put up the slightest resistance,” I held up a perfect, closed-up example and tossed it over the side “over they go!”

“You two are like a frickin’ episode of Seinfeld,” said Jeff, smiling.

Jeff was aware of the nearly ubiquitous sarcastic undercurrent in conversations between Sonny and me, but to an outside observer, we were just nuts.

Sonny was a Kwaj-kid, meaning that he grew up on Kwaj and graduated from Kwajalein Senior High School. He went on to study engineering at Georgia Tech just like his dad, and as soon as he had his degree, he landed a job on Kwaj and came right back out. He used to tell me: “Hey, I did my time back in the states. It just wasn’t for me.”

His parents were Anglo, but from looking at him, you would never have guessed. He was as tanned as a piece of leather from living almost his entire life on Kwaj, and despite drinking at least a six-pack a day, there wasn’t an ounce of fat on his slight frame. His thick hair was jet black at the scalp but gradually faded to a sun-bleached, whitish-orange at the tips. And, of course, he had a sense of humor much like my own.

Before responding to the Harbor Control’s order to return, Jeff turned to me. As Chief Meteorologist for the range, I was expected to be the expert in all things meteorological.

“Remind me of your guys’ criteria for a small craft?”

“Twenty sustained or gusts to thirty,” I responded, shooing a fly from my face. “But that would be the least of our worries from the looks of those,” I said as I turned and pointed to the now towering clouds. Bulbous clouds called mammatus, which is Latin for breast, protruded downward from the underside of the anvils—an ominous sign.

“What’s your E.T.A.?” Jeff asked, implying that he preferred my best estimate over the forecast from Harbor Control.

“Well, the gusts will be well out ahead of the actual storm, and we frequently see forward-building convection that moves faster than the complex.”

“Was there an E.T.A. in there somewhere, Einstein?” Jeff retorted.

The guys laughed.

“If radar indicated ninety minutes, and they’ve been trying us for fifteen, I’d say conditions will be going to shit in forty-five to sixty.”

Jeff clicked the transmit button on the radio and said: “Harbor Control, this is Kilo-six-five, over.”

“Kilo-six-five, Harbor Control, go.”

“It’s too dangerous, and we don’t agree on the timing. We’re going to shelter in place. Over.”

“Roger that Kilo-six-five. Recommend return to port as soon as the weather clears. Over.”

“Roger, wilco. Kilo-six-five clear,” Jeff said as he hung up the radio microphone.

There was no argument from Harbor Control. Local boating regulations made the captain of the boat truly the man in charge. The captain was under no obligation to follow any order that he felt endangered his boat or crew. Harbor Control also knew that we were in a spot that was relatively protected from the wind. We were on the lagoon side, or lee of Bigej Island, which was about as good a place as there was to stay out of the wind. That is why it was a favorite spot among divers and snorkelers—little wind to jostle unattended boats from their anchorage and little wave action to stir up visibility-reducing sediment from the bottom.

We weighed anchor and moved in closer to shore and hunkered down to wait out the storm. It would not have been unusual for the storm to miss us altogether. Convection over the open ocean is so susceptible to random processes that it seems to undergo a build, collapse, and reform cycle almost constantly and never holds together on one course for long. But this storm had an angry look to it.

Worry about Kate and our kids crept into my mind. Kate and I had the two daughters she wanted right off the bat. Elaine came first and was followed about as quickly as humanly possible by Kelly. Elaine and Kelly were less than
a year apart and looked so similar that most people mistook them for twins. But, despite being nothing of the sort, they definitely acted like it.

Then one of us dried up. We worked at the boy I wanted for over two years, and while I enjoyed the effort, we grew worried by the lack of production. We were about ready to consult a doctor when Charlie finally happened.

I’m told that the fact that newborns usually resemble the father is nature’s way of assuring him that it’s his and to get him to stick around. I think that’s ridiculous. Nevertheless, Charlie looked like me from the day he was born and still does.

He was like me in many other ways too. He was the only ten-year-old I had ever heard of that actually listened to the news. I had to be careful when I watched TV around him, since he absorbed nearly everything. Due to his curious nature he would almost certainly be aware of the plague, and I was sure he’d be scared.

“What do you guys think of the plague?” I asked no one in particular.

“I think it’s all overblown,” Bill said as instantly as if he’d been watching my thoughts unfold.

There was a general nod of agreement from the group, except Jeff.

As the sky darkened, everyone grew quiet, and Jeff fidgeted at the helm. Even normally cool Sonny stared at the clouds. We’d all seen storms like this before, but not in a boat with nowhere to hide.

Out in the middle of the ocean, you could check a stop watch by the time in between the onset of the wind and the torrential downpour that followed—five minutes was the norm. The wind came up like a runaway truck. We were less than fifty yards from the beach, and our first sign of the wind was the disturbance in the tree tops on the island. Palm fronds bent and twisted and flapped like the wings of a bird as the gale set in. Entire canopies of palm trees, normally shaped like mushrooms, suddenly folded inside out like a cheap umbrellas and pointed downwind. Debris began breaking off from the trees and flew in our direction. We still only felt a muted version of the wind in our protected little alcove. But there was no doubt the wind had gone from near calm to a fresh breeze to a strong gale in just a few minutes.

We heard the rain before we saw it—the light sound of distant static as the first drops found their way into the forest canopy and then it opened up into a roar as millions of gallons of water poured onto the island.

Then it swept over us.

We were in the boat as a preventative measure against the threat of lightning, and while the boat offered some protection from electrocution, it offered no shield against the driving rain. We were drenched in seconds, and our beer bottles began to fill with water, like miniature rain gauges. Raindrops the size of nickels roughened the surface of the water, each one creating a brief dimple in the water as it stretched the surface tension to breaking, until the entire lagoon looked like the face of a golf ball.