Ian Slater - WW III 02 by Rage of Battle

Author:Rage of Battle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-21T13:19:44+00:00

Atop Hawaii’s island of Maui, it was afternoon, the azure expanse of sea now darkening with no distinguishable horizon in sight, blue upon blue upon blue, silver winking of whitecaps soon indistinguishable, swallowed by the glare of the late sun’s light. The uninterrupted aspect of the Pacific all about the Hawaiian Islands was a sight meteorologist Sam Ronson never tired of watching. As his four-wheel-drive Toyota took the last of the bending zigzag road up to the observatory, he flipped down the visor and wound down the driver’s window, relishing the cold, icy blast of air.

His union had fought vociferously against the U.S. Weather Service scheduling only one meteorological officer for the six-to-midnight watch, arguing that six hours in the high, thin, pristine air was too hard on a single observer. The truth for Sam Bronson, however, and one he was careful not to reveal to the union bosses in Honolulu, was that for his part, he wouldn’t have minded staying up at the observatory all night. He liked the solitude granted him by the astronomer, who was usually too busy to talk. For Sam, the spill of stars in the autumn sky was a sight that never ceased to awe. He wasn’t sure whether there was a God or not, but if there was, then this night sky was more evidence of a supreme being than all the holy books. Night after night he had gazed toward the heavens, transporting himself to worlds beyond. The belief that there were no other beings in the universe seemed to him as silly as the belief that there was an up and down, an idea manufactured by men merely to comfort them in the huge uncertainty of infinity.

But even if he had not enjoyed the “nocturnal star gazing,” as the astronomer on duty called it, Sam treasured this time away from his wife. She was his second and, after his first, his second biggest mistake. Sam didn’t like partying or even talking much. After two wives and four children, what he wanted was to be left alone, to monitor the anemometer for wind speed, the seismograph, and rainfall—now called “precipitation” by the TV forecasters—and to marvel at the fact that within a few thousand feet, Maui’s tropical rain forests were washed by rain that had been snow at the height of the observatory.

When he saw the stylus on the brown recorder jerk to five, registering a quake several hundred miles northwest of the outer island of Kauai, he didn’t bother putting in a call to Honolulu as the information would automatically have gone through from the observatory via the SAT/bounce feed. But when the stylus went to 6.1, he initiated a manual as well as the automatic alarm, which was just as well, for, though he didn’t know it at the time, the automatic sensors on Japan’s west coast were being “fuzzed over” by an electrical storm sweeping down from Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. It meant that Sam Ronson’s warning, via

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