THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller by J.G. Sandom Read Free Book Online

to feel if they were going to respond. Her discipline was desperate for additional researchers, for scientists who might one day prevent another tragedy like this one from ever happening again.
    A spotlight shone upon her head and Swenson took a breath. “To understand tsunamis,” she continued, “you must first distinguish them from wind-generated waves or tides. Breezes blowing across the ocean crinkle the surface into relatively short waves that create currents restricted to a rather shallow layer. While gales, hurricanes and typhoons can whip up waves of thirty meters or even higher in the open ocean, they do not move deep water. Tsunamis are never generated by the gravitational forces of the sun or moon. They’re produced by earthquakes – such as in Sumatra – or, much less frequently, by volcanic eruptions, landslides, or the impact of meteors or comets.”
    She moved from the lectern and a QuickTime sequence filled the movie screen behind her. Blue animated waves began to heave, replaced by a 3-D cutaway of the water column down to the ocean floor. It was impressive animation, colorful and distracting. But most of the audience remained focused on Swenson.
    Dressed in an off-white midi lab coat over a dark plaid skirt, she had spent a long time pinning up her hair into a kind of frumpy bun to prevent it from shimmering distractedly. She wore a pair of tortoise-shell glasses. She wore no makeup and no jewelry. But all of these well-planned counter-measures only seemed to make her more alluring.
    To be intelligent and to look like this? It was a fucking outrage. This is what they were thinking. No one deserved such fortune, no matter what their previous life. Most people believed that if you were good-looking and smart, you must have some hidden failing, deep inside. And even if you didn’t, not really, it meant they had to look for one, which was – in and of itself – a bit of a nuisance. And they always discovered one, even if they had to make it up. It was all about finding balance, some kind of order in their world when confronted with something that was clearly out of sync, unnatural, perhaps a genetic aberration, most certainly a statistical anomaly. Swenson saw the same thing in nature all the time. To be so fortunate meant you were already doomed. What were discrete blessings, individual gifts, together proved too much for most. Sometimes her face and figure helped; usually they were just annoying distractions. As her mother used to say, “We each carry our own cross.” Research was a great place to hide.
    “Tsunamis,” she continued, “can attain speeds of up to 700 kilometers per hour in the central reaches of the oceans. But, despite their speed, tsunamis are generally not particularly dangerous in deep water. Most waves are less than a few meters high, although their lengths can exceed hundreds of kilometers.”
    Another screen popped to life, displaying a view of the Pacific Ocean from space. This morphed into an animation, charting the movement of the wave below. Then the POV collapsed, as if the satellite were falling from the sky, plummeting to the earth like Icarus, only to slow and hover a few feet from the downward side of the tsunami, revealing its low roll.
    “This creates a sea-surface slope so gentle that tsunamis usually pass unnoticed in deep water. Indeed,” she said, “the Japanese word tsu-nami translates literally as ‘harbor wave,’ perhaps because a tsunami can travel undetected across oceans, then rise up unexpectedly within shallow coastal waters.”
    The first screen glowed with a map of the Indian Ocean. “Regardless of their origin,” she said, “tsunamis evolve through three overlapping but quite separate physical processes: generation, by any force that disturbs the water column; propagation, from deeper water near the source, to shallow coastal areas; and, finally, inundation, as the waves sweep up onto dry land. Of these, the propagation phase is the best