Neri looked up and saw it too.
His mother watched it carefully and then suddenly opened her eyes wide. She did not know what it was but it looked like it was headed towards them. “Neri!” she screamed grabbing him by the arm. “Get inside!” she threw him through the door ahead of her. As she began to close the door she paused just for a moment. Why is the sky so blue? she thought. She had never seen it like that before. She blinked and looked at the other buildings around her. Everything looked blue.
The President and his cabinet watched as the giant wave moved up through the Atlantic ocean at a speed of over three hundred miles per hour. The island of Tristan Da Cunha and its small archipelago was just below the latitude of Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and everyone could see clearly from the satellite that if they could not stop it there the damage would start almost immediately when it hit Africa’s southwestern coast, beginning with the first large metropolitan city of Cape Town and its population of over three million. The next city to be devastated was Buenos Aires on the South American coast and the other side of the Atlantic.
Kathryn had landed just minutes ago at McMurdo where she and her team now watched from a large conference room. The room was deathly silent as they watched the giant wave.
The dark line in the ocean approached a small uninhabited island two hundred miles southeast of Tristan. This island would provide the best measurement of the tsunami’s energy. It would be the first island hit full force, and give a visual estimation for what was to come.
Kathryn and her team knew that if a counter wave could not be generated before the tsunami passed much farther beyond this first island, it would not be able to travel far enough from Tristan to provide the effect they needed or spread wide enough across the ocean.
As the tsunami reached the first island it quickly grew much larger on the monitor as the island’s rising mass beneath the ocean forced the full size of the tsunami up to the surface. Kathryn and her team gasped. It was enormous.
In one smooth movement the giant wave struck and quickly wrapped itself around enveloping the entire island. Part of the island’s southern facing cliffs could be seen crumbling into giant pieces before the water engulfed everything. The total shock however, felt both from the White House and McMurdo, came when the island completely disappeared from view. Over twenty five square miles of solid rock reaching hundreds of feet high was completely destroyed in less than a minute. It was as if the top of the island had been simply wiped way.
“Oh my god!” Kathryn Lokke gasped. It was so much bigger than any of them were expecting. Her hopes of stopping this thing, even with a counter tsunami, began to melt.
In the White House, President Carr’s face, as well as the others, went completely white.
The giant wave of destruction continued its relentless push north.
A blue dome covered The Settlement as the intercontinental ballistic missile approached Tristan at over 3,000 miles per hour. Its coordinates were exact. The missile dove and detonated less than 300 feet above the south end of the island. Even with the island’s peak blocking some of the impact, the entire sky turned bright white as the incredible force of the nuclear reaction was unleashed. Much of the rocky slope instantly turned to glass and the downward impact against the giant mountain caused the structure beneath the island to shift and then buckle altogether. A line formed and cut its way across the southern slope, breaking the glass and rock into millions of giant fragments and sending them upward in every direction. A deep rumbling followed shaking the entire island violently. Then in one giant motion, a third of the island slid away from the mountain and off its underwater base, plunging straight into the ocean. The energy released in the warhead was just a fraction of that which was released when the slide displaced an enormous mass of water and pushed it forward into a second giant wave.
The wave raced southward, almost instantly washing over the smaller islands of the archipelago and taking every bit of loose soil or life form with it.
Everyone watched as two waves of unimaginable power sped towards each other. It took less than ten minutes for them to cover the distance. When they reached each other, the impact was easily visible as the dark lines on the satellite suddenly turned white. The white line of impact became thick and began to grow wider and wider, becoming a mile wide, then five miles, then ten. The pressure pushed the water into the air forming a giant white wall which rippled out almost half way across the Atlantic. The wall of water grew taller and taller reaching nearly three hundred feet above the surface before it began to slow. The wall finally stopped and dropped back toward the ocean. When it hit the surface, a giant depression was formed which was quickly covered by the incoming surge from both directions. When both sides of the surge smashed into one another, the force created another smaller wall, which itself dropped down to make another depression and one last small and final surge.