"CATACLYSM '79"
an epic thriller set in British Columbia's Fraser Canyon.
Hello, a guru once told me that a writer needs to show his/her work to secure readers.
This poses the question what part of a wild adventure story should one use? Well,
my higher self suggested after a moment of deep thought, "Go with the Prologue.
It's intriguing and sets the mood." "Ten-four," I said, so here it is. Enjoy. Robert
THE PROLOGUE
The rain came down steadily and mercilessly that Tuesday morning when they plodded and sloshed a path along the slippery muddy and pockmarked road leading to the small municipal cemetery cloaked by sagging aspens and asked to see her grave. McCoy, eyes blinking rapidly as rain trickled off his matted silvery-grey hair, knocked at the door of the custodian's white stuccoed hut.
"Line up at the side window." The bleary-eyed clerk was listless from a lack of sleep. "We're working as fast as we can. It's an immense problem. Wait your turn."
Paul Rowan grunted impatiently, hands plunged deep in the pockets of the mud stained trench coat Halerte had lent him, walked past the hut. They said it never rains in British Columbia in July. They said! The only good thing about the rain was that it saved you from the acrid strench of animal carcasses burning on the hill behind by the health officers. Rowan wanted desperately to be alone because of the overwhelming bitterness, indignation and frustration that possessed an iron grip on his body and mind. The warm rain and the constant humidity did nothing to relieve the bitterness.
Peering through the rain he vaguely distinguished many dark figures wrapped in coats, capes or plastic sheets, some partially hidden under black umbrellas, moving laboriously and noiselessly between the mounds of dark earth, the ugly painful indicators where the dead had been buried in the days before. On the far side near a row of dark slots in the earth a man in rain-soaked denim overalls took shelter under a back-hoe. The grave-digger's dark earth stained hands cupped about his face attempted to shield a cigarette.
A portly man with a vaguely detectable but familiar stoop hurried across the trampled grass as if trying to elude an invisible hunter. The moment he recognized Rowan he stopped. The sunken eyes under the doggie eyelids appealed for sympathy.
"Rowan," he cried hoarsely. "Rowan, tell them…tell them it was all a ghastly mistake."
Pathetically he turned and stared back at the mass graves, tears rolling down his heavily jowled white face. A trembling pudgy hand clung desperately to Rowan's sleeve. Disgusted, Rowan attempted to move away but the hand held fast.
"My God! I didn't know. I just didn't comprehend." The thin voice crackled under mounting hysteria. "Rowan, tell them I didn't know. Oh, Jesus! I didn't know." Then he was gone hurrying down the muddy cemetery path as if pursued by the devil.
Tim McCoy came up puzzled. "Friend of yours?"
Rowan shook his head.
"The face was vaguely familiar."
"It should be. It's splashed on page one of Verity along with the rest of the saga."
"Harlan Foxxe?" McCoy stared at the retreating figure. "The great Harlan Foxxe? You're kidding."
"No, he was the guy who blew it. He failed to recognize tragedy staring him in the face. A provincial cabinet minister obsessed with his own greatness, his own importance. The epitome of a political super-ego." Rowan paused to wipe the rain from his face. "At Amber in the Fraser Canyon and elsewhere when all hell was breaking loose, he failed to see it. We could all see the predictable scenario, everyone except Foxxe."
"And Foxxe held the power."
"Held the power?" Rowan forced a sardonic laugh. "Foxxe was all powerful. He played god and gloated. Foxxe had no doubts he was working a miracle, an open sesame to party leadership and top dog in the government." Rowan clenched his fists. "Somewhere I hope someone is going to bring that bastard to trial."
McCoy frowned. "Why didn't we get that stuff in Verity? Your hospital copy was fantastic."
"Ask Henderson. He was on the desk. Belly ached about possible libel."
"Pea-brained twit," snapped McCoy angrily.
They walked across soggy mud that squelched. McCoy pulled Rowan under a protective tree. "That's incredible about Foxxe. He's the same man you interviewed in Ottawa when you were writing that controversial wrap on Stavrakis and Patras-Apollo."
Rowan nodded. "Foxxe was one of the golden brigade in Ottawa -- choice jobs. Remember, he was appointed Federal Commissioner for Mineral Exploration in the Arctic. Then he got involved with the commission investigating the Berrigan Harbour affair. That stank worse than a fish manure factory."
"Ottawa dumped him faster than a plague victim," said McCoy recalling the scandal.
"That's when he came to the west coast and got into politics in Victoria," added Rowan, then lowering his voice he added: "To look at that scumbag you wouldn't think his father was Colonel George Wimslow-Foxxe, a Canadian who saw action with the 6th Airborne Division in the Normandy Invasion. His bravery earned him the Victoria Cross but like most heroes he failed to live long enough to pick it up. Somehow the blood changed. It curdled."
They stood pensive and uncomfortable letting the rain run off their bare heads and trickle down their faces. Misty figures wandering through the fresh graves came by, nodded silently and moved on quickly.
"You still want to go on, Paul?"
"You're damned right," Rowan muttered as the bitterness and anger swelled up again. "Sure, I want to see her grave and tell her how I feel about things, about life, about how she should not have died, about how I couldn't save her." His right fist punched the tree trunk. "Damn it! I should have risked it! The pain is killing me."
McCoy reached out and steadied Rowan's lean trembling frame. "This is the last place you should be. You've only been out of hospital three hours. Have you taken the stuff the doctor gave you?"
Rowan shook his head and stared off into the rain.
McCoy recalled making his way through the hospital turmoil that morning to collect Rowan. He had felt like a blind man with a vision restored after twenty years of darkness. "They're zombies!" he had hissed as he started the rental Ford Granda. "Totally unbelievable! Everyone, doctors, nurses, orderlies, auxiliaries, volunteers, even the priests -- all with ashen, blood-drained faces, heavy black circles under glassy, staring eyes -- working, talking in unfinished sentences, breathing mechanically. All like bloody automatons."
"Not enough medical people to handle a disaster," muttered Rowan. "Some worked five days without a break, grabbing bursts of sleep on office desks, on storeroom crates, on floors, in the back seats of cars outside. One nurse disappeared. They found her almost dead in a deep freeze unit."
"What happened to the emergency back-up services?"
"They flew them in from Calgary, Toronto, Seattle, even Portland and L.A….nurses, doctors, specialists, radiographers, even ambulances, relief vehicles all with drivers. Even morticians and specialists trained to handle an excess of bodies. The relief crews had been on their feet for forty-eight hours, even longer, and still the victims are being wheeled in."
"Somebody should set up a bloody great memorial to somebody," muttered McCoy.
"Absolutely! A memorial to a sham!" grated Rowan. "Politicians don't give a damn about Civil Defence. I hope there's a monumental inquiry into government support of emergency programmes."
He had paused and stared at McCoy driving. "One thing is glaringly obvious. When a major city is threatened with a cataclysm, the authorities cannot handle a mass evacuation. It's an impossibility. This applies to any major city in the world. The bottom line is you're on your own, baby."
"Watch it, young fellow. You're still pretty weak," McCoy advised as he edged up the Vancouver street and for the first time in four days, Rowan saw the outside world.
As newspapers, radio and TV stations had reported most of downtown core of Vancouver had escaped the disaster, but the lesser communities to the south had been devastated. In places that had survived they had become the world's largest emergency relief centre with schools, community centres, government offices, arenas and other large buildings converted to makeshift hospitals and treatment centres, relocation offices, missing persons information and blanket distribution warehouses. The enormous Pacific National Exhibition grounds was now a refugee camp and processing station for thousands of homeless.
A volunteer offering to set up an indexing on a three-year old Apple One computer quickly returned to a card index system with the comment: "Those Apple computers aren't going to go anywhere."
Relief workers, tents, blankets, fuel, food and water supplies were airlifted to the stricken regions by transport planes from across North America. They landed at Bellingham and were trucked across the U.S.-Canada border. Distribution then became a problem mainly because major highways had been washed out.
"They started letting relatives fly in last night. I swore I was your father," commented McCoy.
Rowan mustered a smile. His hand was shaking as it reached into a pocket for a cigarette. "You hired a car too."
"That was easy. Getting military passes was something else. They've got the entire Fraser Valley zoned off with barbed wire, curfews from nine until six every night. The military is getting tough. They shot two looters last night and arrested some ninety."
It took three hours to drive the forty-two kilometres to the municipal cemetery because of endless delays created by numerous barbed wire road blocks, suspicious soldiers and police demanding passes and waiting on lay-bys to allow military and civilian relief convoys hauling food and supplies to numerous refugee camps to go by.
One monstrous sprawling relief camp comprised at least 5,000 tents. An RCMP corporal who checked their passes said 25,000 men, women and children had been packed in since the disaster. "They've got nowhere to go. Even if their homes are still standing, there's no water, electricity and gas supplies," he added grimly. "Then there's health. So far there's been no reports of typhoid.
"If you're going up to the cemetery beyond Coquitlam, they are burning all the cattle carcasses a short distance beyond. The rain's holding the stink down. Still, you might have to hold your noses," he said easily with a faint shrug.
They drove on along roads cleared of mud and debris. At one point the scarred land swept up to the hills in the distance. It was broken only by foundations of buildings left standing, an occasional iron fence plus numerous and totally indescribable piles of debris.
"They say the total homeless stands at about 300,000 and they're still trying to figure out the death toll," said McCoy as he attempted to get the windshield blades to clear the mud splashes cluttering his vision.
They found her grave, a little mound of fresh earth pockmarked by the drizzling rain. It was among seventeen new graves from the day before. Some graves were hidden by blankets of flowers, their petals and colours mutilated by the rain. One grave had a solitary jam jar with a bunch of dandelions. A card was pinned underneath showed the almost washed out words "Good-bye Dad. We love you."
For the most part the graves were ugly plain mounds of earth decorated only by simple wooden stakes on which black numbers had been crudely painted.
"Four-thirty-one," said McCoy peering down at the stick. "This is the one. She's here."
Rowan brushed the rain from his face and allowed his hands to touch first the stake, then the earth. His fingers at first caressed the earth, then they dug in deep. There were many things he wanted to say about the short time he had known her, the sadness and grief that had scarred her life, the dedication and understanding she had shown to others, particularly the Indian and her love for the boy.
All the time he was recovering in hospital he had considered what he would say. Now the words were meaningless. Shallow. Futile. Unnecessary. She would understand.
"There's still hope," said McCoy as Rowan stood up and slowly shook the earth from his fingers.
"Shapiro's note said they're still looking for the others."
"Then there's still hope."
"Hope is the great cure-all. It's everything and it's nothing," said Rowan as he regarded the heavy grey sky above the trees. "They say hope is the great panacea but like aspirin it eventually grows thin and you are left with a numbing fear. You haven't seen hope in the raw until you have seen those drawn distant faces of the Palestinian refugees in the Jordanian camps, the little farmers of Vietnam who valiantly and futilely worked the rice fields while a full scale bloody war raged about them. I did a story on a farmer named Binh who heard bombing in the distance and went home to find his village no longer there. Someone had dropped napalm. Binh's name meant Peace. He never found his family and he never gave up hope."
Rowan turned and peered at the publisher. "The people of Biafra, Nigeria, Rhodesia, South Africa, Northern Ireland and dozens of other places around the world all hit by natural and human-spawned tragedies -- all had hope. They possessed a universal ambition, one desire, one hope in life to live a productive life, make a family, love their children and see their grandchildren grow up before they died."
The writer blew the water dripping from his nose. "You know, the ambitions and the dreams of ordinary people are so damned simple but they get royally fucked up by politicians, lawmakers, generals, idealists, special interest groups and pure screwballs who think they have the divine right to tell ordinary people how to live."
"There's still hope," added McCoy.
"People say the big event, the big disaster, the big war is the worst tragedy to stomach. Others say it is the period of hope with its flickering doubts that is the hardest to endure. It's not! The toughest comes when all hope is gone, all is plain dead and there is nothing to replace it except cold numbing despair."
"There's always hope," McCoy said stubbornly. "At this stage there's a lot of hope."
They stood silently at the grave for several minutes before turning back and walking down the muddy path that led past the custodian's little white hut and the line of wet hunched people hoping for information.
McCoy stopped. "Paul. What's wrong with a book?"
"What do you mean?" The remark took Rowan by surprise.
"A book. Tell the story as you saw it."
"Crap!"
"For heaven's sake! Paul, you were the only writer there from beginning to end. You saw it all. You were part of it. Listen! A lot of hacks are oiling their typewriters on this story. Sure, they'll write paperback quickies but not with the same inside knowledge, the inside experiences, the inside emotions you have."
McCoy with rain trickling down his pink leathery face moved closer to Rowan and peered up at the writer. "Tell people the way you saw it…about the great hotel tycoon Victor Stavrakis…the greed and brutality of a smoothie like Wallace Harper…the rich kooky Keller-Jonnson woman. Tell them about the gold…about Vicar's Peak…about the Indian…about the girl called Jenny trying to recover from the hippie era…and tell them about Natalie.
Rowan stiffened. "Not Natalie!"
"Why not? Natalie was an intricate part of the events. You were deeply in love with her…"
"Hell! I screwed up her life. It was never the same again," snapped Rowan.
"Tell it!" McCoy's pale eyes carried the fire of raw indignation, the tireless curiosity, the relentless business instinct that had made him one of Canada's top news magazine bosses. "Tell it like it happened. It's a bloody good story."
Paul Rowan's initial reaction was one of sharp rejection. Turn it down. Run away simply because he knew the bitterness reigning supreme in his mind would distort the writing. McCoy had always demanded of his reporters: "Write with all the facts, colour, atmosphere, drama and emotion you can amass, but above all write fairly, accurately and without bias." That was the McCoy creed, the basic philosophy for his successful weekly news magazine. It was under this banner that Rowan was assigned so many world news stories before he took up travel writing "for a break."
The shot came without warning. It cracked out once disrupting for less than a second the hiss of the rain. It echoed briefly through the aspen lining the cemetery walls. For several seconds nothing happened then people started moving. Somebody at the gate screamed for the police. A man emerged from the custodian's office, flipped an umbrella and scrambled towards the gate. Rowan and McCoy followed slowly at first, then raced through the mud and rain dodging people standing frozen on the path.
A group of people with strained faces flocked around a black Cadillac. Rowan pushed through. A soldier wielding an FN rifle ordered everyone to move back but not before Rowan had seen the blood-splattered windshield and beyond it the crumpled lifeless figure sprawled grotesquely over the steering wheel. A gun had fallen onto a packet of stale, half-eaten sandwiches on the seat. Rowan turned back to the expectant McCoy.
"Harlan Foxxe."
More police and troops converged on the scene and ordered the crowd to move back. An RCMP sergeant called for any witnesses to step forward but nobody answered. Who wanted involvement? Who needed more trouble? An alert young soldier by the Cadillac picked up a torn piece of neat paper, wiped the mud from one edge and handed it to the police sergeant. "Any good?"
"Too faint to read," the sergeant said quickly. "No, a girl signed it…Joan, Jane, Jan.. or something. It's not a suicide note. Nice try though, young fellow." The sergeant watched a constable drop the gun into a plastic bag."
Rowan and McCoy walked back to the Granada, dumped their soaking coats onto the back seats and headed back to West Vancouver.
"First I'll call Halerte and tell him about Harlan Foxxe," said Rowan.
"And then?"
"I'd better sound out a publisher, a good book publisher."
"There's Verity Books, my company in Montreal," snapped McCoy. "One look at another publisher and I'll punch your ear in spite of my being twice your age."
"Bloody capitalist!"
McCoy grinned. "Where are you going to write it? There's a place back in the Algoma country…"
"Too many memories," replied Rowan. "I'll find a room in West Vancouver overlooking the Pacific and write it there."
McCoy nodded. "Sorry about Algoma. It's best you stay here until you know."
Rowan nodded. He appreciated McCoy's understanding. "Hope is the great panacea. Until I know for sure there will always be hope."
"Cataclysm '79" by Robert Egby is available through most bookshops along with
Amazon in various countries. It is also available as an ebook on Kindle at $2.99.
Another thriller by Robert Egby is "The Guardians of Stavka: The Deadly Hunt for the Romanov Gold"
also set in Canada.