The Nemesis Program

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Ben blinked. No, he wasn’t imagining things, though he wished he were. What he was seeing was real — and becoming more horrifyingly real by the split second.

In the distance, all across the horizon as far as he could crane his neck to see, the ocean was rising. Rising in a towering blue-green wall, eighty or a hundred feet high crested by raging white foam. It was a wave like nothing he’d ever seen or imagined, and it was growing larger and closer with incredible speed. The hazy far-off islands across the Mentawai Strait were no longer there. They’d simply been engulfed by what Ben realised was a giant tsunami now bearing down on the Sumatra coastline. The tiny white specks he could see being devoured in its path were ships, powerless to escape becoming entangled and crushed by the unstoppable force of water.

‘Ben!’ Roberta’s voice below. She’d finished tying the rope around herself and was tugging it to distract him. ‘What’s the matter? Hey, Ben?’

He couldn’t find the words to answer her. Could barely tear his eyes from the approaching wave. How far? Ten miles away? How long? Not long. Not long at all before it hit them. And there was no possibility, none whatsoever, that it would miss. Nothing could escape it. The tree line of their little peninsula would be helpless in the face of the wave. The trees would snap like cocktail sticks under the force. The exposed south-west wall of the empty building would be next.

And then the whole coastline. Hundreds of ports, beaches, towns and villages. Tens of thousands of people, already thrown into panic by the tremors but completely unprepared for the devastation that was coming for them next.

In just the few seconds that Ben had been staring helplessly at it, the wall of water had raced miles towards the shoreline and it was building fast, as tall as the masthead of the small sailing yacht Ben could see desperately trying to get out of its path. As he watched, the boat was snatched up and flung down like a toy before the monstrous wave swallowed it up and came rolling onwards. The distance to the shore was shrinking fast. It would be here in a short matter of minutes.

He tore his gaze away from the surreal spectacle and looked down. Roberta was tugging at the rope, smiling up at him. Both she and Quigley were still in a state of jubilant relief that the earthquake was over, completely unaware for the moment that what they’d all felt was just the residual tremors of a far bigger quake miles out to sea. A quake that Ben knew had been purposely aimed with deadly precision. Craine’s show wasn’t over. It had barely even begun yet.

‘Climb!’ Ben roared down at them, gesticulating at the window. ‘Roberta! Climb!’

She stared up at him, not understanding. He began hauling on the rope. His voice was too choked with heart-racing panic to yell in more than monosyllables. ‘Wave! Wave!’

Roberta’s face fell as the realisation hit her. She grasped the rope and began to climb as Ben pulled upwards with all his energy. His mind was racing with calculations. Would there be time to get both Roberta and Quigley up here to the relative safety of the roof space before the wave hit the shoreline? And even then, would they be perched up high enough to avoid the direct impact of the water? The wave would break on the shore. There was no way it could reach any distance inland and still remain so high. But what if it could? And what if the building couldn’t withstand the shock? He feverishly tried to imagine the kind of forces involved. Forces that could crumple the old factory like a doll’s house, collapsing the roof and bringing them all down into the torrent under a ton of wreckage.

Roberta was struggling determinedly up the rope, her frantic movements making it sway wildly from side to side and even harder for Ben to keep his grip as he fought to reel her upwards, one hand over the other while trying to keep himself from toppling off the beam.

The roar of the impending wave was growing louder and louder. ‘Faster!’ Ben yelled. Snatching another glance through the window, he saw it was too late. The wall of water was nearly on them. It had to be tearing towards the coastline at five hundred miles an hour. Roberta wasn’t going to make it.

Then the wave hit the shore in a simultaneous explosion the whole length of the miles of coast Ben could see from the window. The violence of the impact made the earth shake as the gigantic force of tens of millions of tons of rushing water swallowed up the shore and ripped unstoppably through the forest of the little peninsula. Instantly, the crushing momentum of the tsunami turned into a battering ram of unimaginable power as it became dense with the mass of a thousand disembodied and uprooted trees.

Ben could do nothing but keep hauling on the rope. Roberta was nearly there … nearly there …

In just a few pounding heartbeats, the mountain of water reached the building. Ben was very nearly jolted from his seating by an impact five times greater than the tremors that had shaken the building minutes before. He didn’t even have time to shout to Roberta to hang on. The cracks in the ocean-facing wall widened into splits and suddenly a whole section of stonework gave way and came bursting inwards in an explosion of foaming water and rubble. The floor below was almost instantly engulfed. Desperately clutching the rope, Ben saw Quigley go down in the surging foam and vanish. He resurfaced for an instant and then was gone again as a gigantic uprooted tree trunk came crashing through the broken wall and seemed to roll right over him.

Roberta swung wildly on the end of the rope, her eyes and mouth wide open in horror. She was just a few feet short of the girder now, but the foaming water was cascading in relentlessly and rising faster than Ben could have imagined. Its roar all but drowned out Roberta’s cry as the churning surface engulfed her legs, then surged up to her waist.

‘I can’t swim!’ she screamed up at Ben. ‘Don’t let me—’ But before she could get the words out, her shoulders and head disappeared under the surface and all Ben could see was the rope stretched taut between him and the rising water. He was suddenly grappling with a far greater weight as the enormous force of the current threatened to carry her away. He cried out as the rope slipped through his hands, stripping the skin off his palms. He didn’t know how he was able to hang on, only that he couldn’t — mustn’t — let go.

He gritted his teeth and kept pulling. After shooting up twenty-five feet in a matter of moments, the water level had stabilised and was rising only imperceptibly. But the entire ocean seemed to be pouring into the building, bringing with it an endless mass of tree wreckage. More sections of wall were beginning to cave in.

Roberta’s head and shoulders broke through the boiling foam. Her hair was slicked across her face and she was coughing and spluttering, but clutching the rope with an iron will. Ben quickly secured his end to the girder, then gripped on with his leg and flipped himself over to hang upside down so he could reach out and take her hand.

His fist closed around her wrist. ‘I’ve got you! You’re okay!’ he shouted over the deafening thunder of the water. With a heave, he hauled her free of the swirling current and she was able to clamber up his dangling body to the girder. She clung there dripping, speechless from shock, trembling with cold. Ben righted himself and held her tight as the wreckage-laden flood surged just a few feet below them.

He’d given up on Jack Quigley minutes ago. It was with amazement that he saw the American suddenly surface, spewing water and hanging doggedly to the branches of the huge trunk that Ben had been certain must have driven him under and crushed him to a pulp. Quigley’s tree was spinning round on itself in the current. A powerful eddy was drawing it towards the middle of the roof support section on which Ben and Roberta were perched. It was coming in fast. Too fast, Ben thought as he realised it was going to ram right into the central pillar supporting the beams.

It hit with a crash and an explosion of spray, smashing the pillar to pieces. With its underneath support gone, Ben and Roberta’s girder gave a lurch and, with a screech of buckling metal, sagged towards the water. For an instant, Ben was convinced they were going under — but the iron structure was still attached at one end to the last section of seaward wall still standing and held together, dangling low above the racing surface.

‘Quigley!’ Ben yelled. The American was thrashing blindly in the water, trying to disentangle himself from the branches of the tree. Any moment, the current was going to roll the trunk back over him, driving him underwater again. Nobody could be so lucky twice. ‘Come on! You can make it!’ Ben reached out to him and gripped his arm.

The battered, soaked Quigley scrambled up to join them on the girder. His face was white under the bruises, his hands were shaking violently and he was too aghast to utter a word.

The torrent had inched its way almost to the level of the windows. Ben knew that if the remnants of the wall gave way, the whole building was going to collapse beneath the surface and take them with it. He jabbed a pointing finger at the windows and shouted, ‘We have to get to the roof! Keep moving higher!’

But the words were barely out of his mouth before the thing he’d been most dreading began to happen.