5 Days to Landfall Read online

  5 DAYS TO LANDFALL

  A Novel

  By Robert Roy Britt

  Copyright © 2016 by Robert Roy Britt

  RobertRoyBritt.com

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion of it may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review, which is highly encouraged. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

  Published by Ink • Spot

  P.O. Box 74693

  Phoenix, Arizona 85087

  InkSpotBooks.com

  Published in the United States of America

  Cover by Trent Design

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are imaginary or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, places, companies or events is totally coincidental.

  Praise for 5 DAYS TO LANDFALL

  ★★★★ “THRILLING. The perfect storm of drama and suspense. One part natural disaster tale, one part crime thriller, and one part romance make for a fast-paced ride.”

  — IndieReader

  ★★★★½ “A tense thrill ride from start to finish … a rollicking good story.”

  — Self-Publishing Review

  “A vigorous tale in which a violent, inescapable storm terrorizes everyone, even the villains. Perspectives from multiple characters are a worthy setup for an exhilarating final act, with a relentless hurricane and a frighteningly high body count.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “A page-turner … masterfully blends a fictional thriller with science and history.”

  — Bestsellersworld.com

  Praise for the author’s Eli Quinn Mystery Series

  FIRST KILL (Book 3)

  ★★★★★ “Jam-packed with thrilling fight scenes, witty banter, and well-worn characters, FIRST KILL is an excellent addition to the private detective genre with a likeable hero and a lovable sidekick.”

  — IndieReader

  ★★★★★ “Methodical, yet fast-paced thriller… FIRST KILL solidifies Quinn as a deeply developed hero with great potential for future installations.”

  — Self-Publishing Review

  “Britt offers a sharp, hearty narrative… Another worthy outing for the quick-witted, ever evolving private eye.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “An exciting thriller … full of intrigue, sex, and even some humor.”

  — Bestsellersworld.com

  “A well-plotted story full of twists and turns with a cast of attention-grabbing characters and dialogue that throws sparks all over the place.”

  — Silvia Villalobos, author of Stranger or Friend

  DRONE (Book 2)

  “A brisk detective novel sequel that packs a punch.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  ★★★★★ “Quinn’s second case reads as if it were written by a master reaching the height of his craft. With its witty banter, cast of colorful secondary characters, and promising detective agency, DRONE sidles into the genre with aplomb. … Characterizations are top notch, the plot is believably paced with ratcheting tension, and the prose is highly polished. … Quinn’s personality gives him an everyman feel that makes him easy to connect with. Unlike more intellectual literary detectives, Quinn is relatable and fun to root for.”

  — Foreword Clarion Reviews

  ★★★★★ “Fast-paced with a few thought-provoking twists, DRONE is reminiscent of a noir detective story with a 21st century flair.”

  — IndieReader

  “Britt’s writing moves briskly with prose that Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler might have applauded. Clipped, no-nonsense dialogue, fast-paced prose and tough-guy characters recall classics such as The Maltese Falcon or The Long Goodbye.”

  — BlueInk Review

  “Immediately absorbing and thoroughly entertaining.”

  — Bestsellersworld.com

  “Robert Roy Britt’s writing is engaging and captivating—written both with a mature slant and just a little camp. Britt takes on a well-trod genre and introduces a distinct yet fitting addition to its hall of fame. Both brilliant and humble, hard-nosed and gentle, Eli Quinn’s mettle is thoroughly tested in curious and entertaining ways. It’s hard to make an original detective, but Britt is more than up to the challenge. He does a wonderful job of telling this twisting tale with excellent pace.”

  — Self-Publishing Review

  CLOSURE (Book 1)

  “Fascinating characters, hard-edged action … Catapults the series off to a great start.”

  — Bestsellersworld.com

  “A gritty, hard-boiled detective thriller, with a twist of self-awareness that keeps the read fresh and engaging. The story keeps you on your toes through a murder case that proves to be less than typical. Eli Quinn begins his saga as a private investigator with a bang … Quinn is truly a classic protagonist in the making.”

  — Self-Publishing Review

  “Quinn’s narrative often sports the hardened cynicism of a seasoned veteran … Solo nearly steals the story; he can intimidate with a single bark and a follow-up growl.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  MURDER MOUNTAIN (Short Prequel)

  “An excellent quick mystery.”

  “An engaging tale of pursuit.”

  “Britt writes tight prose.”

  — Amazon Readers

  ~ ~ ~

  “Many New York City metropolitan area transportation systems are vulnerable to flooding, some possibly with catastrophic consequences… Government officials and citizens alike must understand that New York City will be struck by a catastrophic hurricane sometime in the future and that preparedness is of the utmost importance.”

  — From the 1994 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers New York State Hurricane Evacuation Study

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Decades and even centuries before the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, tropical storms terrified and crippled the Northeast multiple times. But history is easily forgotten. At the turn of the millennium, the idea of a hurricane striking New York City was unthinkable, except to the scientists who knew their history. Despite advice from the research community, the City had yet to put an evacuation plan into place, and residents and officials alike were dismissive of the risks.

  Sandy, a horrific storm, was not the worst nature has to offer. Had Sandy moved as fast as the storm characterized in this book, well, you can read for yourself.

  This story is based on real science and the state of technology, politics and preparedness of 1999. Every attempt has been made to achieve accuracy, both in portraying plausible meteorological and hydrological events and the documented effects of historical storms.

  ~ ~ ~

  Excerpted from Hurricanes: History and Dynamics, by Dr. Nicholas K. Gray, Humboldt University Press (1998)

  In the late summer of 1938 a wave of energy moved off the coast of Africa. Winds were sucked into the atmospheric depression and curved by the earth’s spin into a counterclockwise rotation.

  The storm churned unnoticed across the open sea, gathering strength from warm tropical waters. On Friday, September 16, a Brazilian freighter reported the storm.

  Gordon Dunn and Grady Norton, U.S. Weather Bureau forecasters in Florida, issued a hurricane warning for Miami, expecting the storm to hit Tuesday. Miami residents stockpiled supplies, boarded windows, secured boats. But on Monday evening, the storm turned north and sped up to twenty miles an hour. It followed a typical path of recurvature—resembling a giant C—around the Bermuda High, an area of high atmospheric pressure in the mid-Atlantic that pushes air outward from its center, bouncing hurricane
s off its edges like bubbles.

  Dunn and Norton lost track of the storm off Cape Hatteras and assumed it would curve eastward. The national weather map for Wednesday, September 21, showed no hurricane, only a storm moving out to sea. But winds increased to 140 miles an hour. The storm moved north and picked up speed. The Bermuda High had moved to forty-four degrees north latitude—from its normal September position of thirty to thirty-five degrees—blocking the hurricane’s path and deflecting it northward. Abnormally warm water fed the storm as its forward speed increased to sixty miles an hour. Waves tore up boardwalks in New Jersey. No warnings were issued. It had been 117 years since the last great storm hit New York, on September 23, 1821. History had been forgotten.

  By Wednesday afternoon, shingles were flying from roofs on Long Island. The sky grew dark. Trees were uprooted and telephone poles snapped like matchsticks. Three hours before high tide, residents reported a thick bank of gray fog, twenty-five to forty feet above the water, rolling in toward the south-facing coast. Some residents fled to relative safety across the bridge. Many did not. Most of them died as the “fog bank” turned out to be a wall of water known as a storm surge.

  Created partly by the vacuum of reduced atmospheric pressure and more so by the wind blowing over the water, the storm surge was highest in an area just east of the eye—the right side of the storm when looked at from above. There, in the right-side eyewall, the counterclockwise winds combined with the storm’s forward speed to create gusts exceeding 200 miles per hour.

  The eye of the hurricane passed some fifty-miles miles east of Manhattan, a near miss in meteorological terms. Had it been a few miles west of Manhattan, forensic hurricanologists agree it would have devastated the island.

  ~ ~ ~

  Sunday, August 22, 1999

  CHAPTER 1

  NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER,

  MIAMI, FLORIDA

  9:30 A.M.

  Amanda Cole had never been to Atlantic City, never put a dollar down on a blackjack table, never pulled the lever of a slot machine. Hurricanes were the only thing she ever bet on, and she usually did so conservatively. Amanda figured she had until the end of the day—the bet had to be down 120 hours before landfall. But she was ready. She launched the email program on the PC in her cubicle, double-clicked on her own name. An email to herself, dated, proof of her bet.

  To: me

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: 5 days to landfall

  my pick on harvey: atlantic city, 11 p.m., friday 8/27.

  cheers,

  me

  Amanda hit the enter button to send the email, then closed her eyes. If Harvey did what she feared he might—the eye making landfall in Atlantic City—then the worst part of the storm, the right-side eyewall, would slam into the most unprepared city in the East, and she would win dinner at a top Miami restaurant from Frank Delaney. It was a bet she hoped to lose.

  Amanda scanned the official bulletin on Harvey, a twenty-four-hour forecast she’d released to the public from the Hurricane Center earlier in the morning:

  BULLETIN

  HURRICANE HARVEY ADVISORY NUMBER 21

  NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MIAMI FL

  8 AM EDT SUNDAY AUG 22

  …HARVEY BECOMES HURRICANE… MOVING TOWARD LEEWARD ISLANDS…

  AT 8 AM EDT… 1200Z… THE CENTER OF HURRICANE HARVEY WAS LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 18.4 NORTH… LONGITUDE 53.2 WEST OR ABOUT 560 MILES… 900KM… EAST NORTHEAST OF ANTIGUA IN THE LEEWARD ISLANDS.

  HARVEY IS MOVING TOWARD THE WEST NEAR 12 MPH… 19 KM/HR… A GRADUAL TURN TO THE WEST NORTHWEST IS EXPECTED DURING THE NEXT 24 HOURS.

  MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS ARE NEAR 75 MPH… 120 KM/HR. SOME STRENGTHENING IS LIKELY TO OCCUR DURING THE NEXT 24 HOURS.

  Likely to occur. The forecaster’s language was always guarded. Any forecast beyond twenty-four hours—even for a specialist in the nation’s nerve center for hurricane forecasting—stretched weather data, computer models and human understanding to the limits. But a hurricane specialist couldn’t resist taking a stab at a five-day forecast for earth’s most powerful storms. Amanda Cole and Frank Delaney had been doing it for a decade, making the guess and placing the bet, between friends.

  She opened her brown eyes and squinted at the satellite image on the PC. The whorl of clouds had been a fluffy, ill-defined pinwheel all morning. Amanda leaned closer, put her finger on a blurry dark spot at the lower left of the pinwheel.

  “I see you,” she said.

  Hurricane Harvey’s wide, fuzzy eye was becoming more distinct.

  Amanda leaned back, gathered her straight black hair behind her head into a short ponytail, took a deep breath.

  “Gonna get into your mind, Harvey,” she said to the satellite image. “Give me a couple days. Then you don’t go anywhere without me knowing. Got it?”

  From its genesis off Africa seven days ago, the seed that became Harvey developed routinely, winds rushing counterclockwise and inward around the low-pressure center. As Harvey strengthened, he controlled more atmosphere and created erratic winds within a well-defined storm system. Organized instability, Amanda called it.

  Harvey was Amanda Cole’s responsibility to forecast. But the storm was nearly 2,000 miles out in the Atlantic, a threat to no one for the moment.

  She got up from her cubicle, crossed the vast, colorless room, and walked unannounced into the director’s office. Frank Delaney sat behind a simple desk, his athletic, six-foot-two frame hunched forward, wise black eyes peering from underneath graying eyebrows and through a lattice of fingers pressed together in thinking mode. Mr. Rogers plus twenty pounds, Amanda thought, and more serious.

  “I don’t like what I see on Harvey,” Amanda said.

  Delaney smiled as though he expected her to say that. “Get in his mind yet?”

  “Not completely,” Amanda said. “But he’s got purpose. I can feel it. He’s growing so fast. Couple days he’s going to be a monster.” She visualized the green line for Harvey, a 72-hour forecast that pointed vaguely toward northern Florida. A red line did the same except for a slightly more northerly inclination. “Bermuda High is strong. But Friday it’s going to be sitting up where it was in 1938. The operational computer models don’t understand that this far in advance. And Harvey could be here Friday morning.”

  “If he hits the Southeast,” Delaney said.

  “If he hits the Southeast.” Amanda inclined her head.

  “But you don’t think he’s going to.”

  Amanda smiled tightly. At fifty-six, Frank Delaney was twenty years her senior, and in many ways like a father. He knew her as well as anyone, and right now he would know she had an idea trying to skirt the scientific cautions of her mind and become grist for the what-if mill. He would have also compared the green line of the operational forecast to the red line they were both reluctant to talk about.

  “Could be Florida, could be the Carolinas, might go out to sea,” Amanda said. “But I think he could reach the coast by Friday morning, which means…”

  “…He could be in New York by Friday night or Saturday morning.”

  “Five days to landfall in the most vulnerable city in the East,” Amanda said.

  Delaney sighed and put a hand up. “I know. Listen. We’ve feared it, me more than anyone. But, Christ…” Delaney got up, walked around the desk and closed the door. He returned to his chair. “Christ, even a hint of New York gets out of this place and we’ve got a helluva problem on our hands unless we’re right.”

  “We can’t stick our heads in the sand, either. You know how people think hurricanes never make it to the Northeast.”

  Delaney made a church steeple with his fingers. “You off tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” Don’t ask me what I’m going to do.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Damn. Amanda knew exactly what she planned to do. There was another storm out there, closer, and she had two days off. Hurricane Gert was just 400 miles offshore and barreling toward the Carolinas. Ama
nda pulled her shoulders back and spoke with a lifted chin: “Chase Gert.”

  “Oh, Christ, Amanda.” Delaney rolled his eyes. “You do good science. Great science. Why do you need this thrill-seeking crap?”

  “Off my case, Dad,” she said with a blend of affection and anger. Frank Delaney was not her father, but sometimes he acted like it.

  “Alright,” he said. “What about Sarah?”

  Amanda looked away, at the floor, and took a second. “She’s going to go spend two weeks with her father. His summer vacation. He picks her up this evening.”

  “Why don’t you just tell him no?”

  “I can’t. He’s got visitation on the weekends, which he hardly ever takes, then he gets two weeks every summer. That’s the agreement. I want to just keep her all the time, you know. But sometimes I think I get hyper-maternal and I know I’ve got to try and relax a little. I guess what it comes down to is I really want her to know her father.”

  “Must be really hard.”

  “It’ll be hell for me, Frank. She’s six. The selfish part of me doesn’t want to be away from her for twenty-four hours, let alone two weeks.”

  “So you go back to chasing hurricanes, your great escape.”

  It was a great escape. At thirty-six, she wondered why she kept at it. The answer was always the same: She was still searching for the passing eye of a hurricane: First, there would be violence. Then, calm. Then violence again. It was a goal she’d come close to several times but had never achieved.