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  “That would be the Azure Breeze and the Surf Club?”

  “Right. They would tend to funnel a high incoming tide between them. The water would cross the key along this line here, from this swimming pool area across the road about here, and down this drainage ditch and onto the cleared land. It would gutter the cleared land and the dredged material and run off into the bay.”

  “Don’t they have seawalls and rocks and things in front of Azure Breeze and the Surf Club?”

  “I inspected them. They might as well have feather pillows. It’s a cheap job. They should have thought in terms of maybe a thousand dollars a linear foot for the revetment with the seawall behind it. First let me explain that the bottom deepens more rapidly off that area than elsewhere. They’ve got seven- to eight-foot depth about fifty to sixty feet offshore. See how it darkens on the aerial? I won’t go into the math, but the revetment isn’t thick enough, and it is sloped wrong, and the stones are too small. There isn’t enough toe protection. Second, the wall behind it is just as bad. Judging from the height, I think the piling depth is probably too shallow, going down maybe eight or nine feet instead of fifteen. There’s evidence of toe failure and some scouring and loss of fill down under the wall already. Wave dynamics are tremendous. Those big beasts will come marching in, smash like freight trains, bust things up, pull them back toward the waterline on the runoff. They’ll take the revetment first and then suck away the wall. Ten minutes after the first wave breaks against that wall, it will be chunks of concrete spread wide and slowly being covered by the sand. My third point is that the water depth offshore gives the waves a chance to move farther in before breaking, and also there is the water depth in the bay. The bay is wide there, as you can see, and here is the channel they are quote scouring unquote out to the regular channel. My fourth reason is that this area lacks the protection of that offshore bar that starts farther south down the key.”

  “Right along there is where the road floods after heavy rains,” Rhoades said.

  “Low area. Here is the picture. The storm crests will smack and run up the slope after they’ve finished off the wall. As they run back they’ll suck back sand and dirt. When the tide gets higher, the water will spill across the road and it won’t run back. The higher the tide, the farther into the key the waves will break. If everything goes right—or wrong—you could have ten to fifteen feet of water across the key and across the bay and into the city. They better have the keys evacuated by then.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “They better work on it. When the runoff starts, it will come across the key in the lowest place. At first it will run off across the key everywhere, but as the water level behind the key drops, it will run off where it is gouging the best channel. And that should be right through here. The deeper the channel gets, the more runoff it can accept. And this is where you’ll have the new pass.”

  “How big could it be?”

  “The least it will be has to be three hundred feet wide and five to six feet deep. I would guess from here to here, almost straight across.” He marked the area.

  After a time Mick looked up at him, eyes wide and round. “But Jesus Christ, Harrison, that would wipe out these four condos, wouldn’t it?”

  “You can bet the family jewels on it.”

  “Who the hell are you? You sell marine insurance?”

  Sam grinned and dug into the portfolio. “Here’s a copy of my résumé.”

  Rhoades went over it carefully. He sighed and handed it back. “Mostly ocean stuff? Waves and protection and so on?”

  “And mining the ocean deep.”

  “What’s your interest in all this?”

  “I was hired to see if it was as bad as my employer thinks it is, and so I could go tell him it is, and he would move away, because he can afford to.”

  “I would guess that he can afford to move if he can afford you.”

  “What? Oh, sure. The price is on the second page of that thing. I thought it might be nice if people had some clue as to what might happen to them. I was asking around and your name came up.”

  “You mean, like … warn people?”

  “I guess so.”

  “ ‘Dear residents of Golden Sands, Captiva House, Azure Breeze and the Surf Club. You bought a bad deal. Your apartments are going to fall into the water.’ Come on, Sam. Much as I would like to bring a couple of those big glassy obscenities crashing down … my God, what kind of suits would be filed against me and the paper?”

  “I can give you a signed report, on the house. With credentials. I can even find some local engineering types in state government to back me up.”

  “So who would believe it anyway?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Come on, Mick. You seem like a reasonable man. If I showed you an empty key, low and flat with no buildings, roads, bridges, or people, and showed you the swash channels silting up, and showed you the history of other sandspits in the same geographical area, you would buy the concept that sooner or later, inevitably, a hurricane would cut the key in two.”

  “Sooner or later. Okay.”

  “The more silted the regular channels, the smaller the overtide and excess rainfall necessary to cut the new pass. Buy that?”

  “Okay.”

  “Now does it make any real difference whether this key has people on it or not? No. Does it make any difference whether it happens this year or next or not for ten years? No. The population isn’t going to move away. The longer we wait, the more people involved, and the more potential loss of life. Final point. If those fourteen acres had not been cleared, I would have had to nominate one of these other two areas as the most probable.”

  “So how did it happen? That’s what you want to know?”

  “If you would like to tell me, I would like to know.”

  “There’s better coffee down the street.”

  The Place had fresh ground coffee and two hundred kinds of doughnuts. Mick Rhoades and Sam Harrison carried their coffee and doughnuts to a plastic booth in the back. Rhoades kept his voice down.

  “We get good county commissions and bad county commissions, and some in between. This one is sort of in between, shading toward bad. Troy Abel and Wally Wing are solid but not too sharp. Jack Dorsey and Steve Corbin are on the make. Justin Denniver is chairman at the moment. They pass it around. We’ve had trouble getting a good county manager to replace the one we lost three years ago. The present one, Tod Moran, is a fair head, but lazy. He delegates everything to his assistant, Billy Scherbel. Now I had to do some digging for this. I nearly lost my hearing and my sanity going back over those low-fidelity recordings of the commission meetings. I could figure out the approximate date, but I couldn’t pin it down. Finally I nailed it. At a meeting in May, Billy Scherbel came in with a lot of things which needed commission approval. Denniver asked him if there were any big deals in that list, anything requiring special discussion, and Scherbel said no. Then he asked if the county manager’s office recommended approval, and Scherbel said yes. So Steve Corbin moved that Scherbel read the whole list and they would approve it all in one chunk, and Jack Dorsey seconded it and it passed. The way it was hidden, the request came from the Palm Coast National Bank and the land was referred to by government lot line and marker and so on, and it asked for a one-year extension on a permit to clear the land, and a permit to scour an existing channel to its original depth of five feet at low tide. By the way, the clearing permit included a permit to burn the trees they clear off. That was an old-type permit. You have to have a separate one now. With the way the land was identified, it looked to me as if somebody got to Scherbel. So I braced him, and he got very uneasy and evasive. And he got angry. If I had to make a guess, I would say somebody set Billy up somehow. He’s not the type that angles for payoffs. He’s too scared of the IRS. He does like young girls. He’s always had a taste for them. It wouldn’t be too hard to set him up on statutory. It’s just a guess, on account of how he ov
erreacted.

  “Anyway, I had to check out the ownership on that land. I got Al Borne’s side of the story. He’s the trust officer at Palm Coast National, handling the Becky Silverthorn estate. He’d sold an option on the property to Marty Liss, head of the Marliss Corporation. Marty sold his option rights to something called the Letra Corporation, which is fronted by Lew Traff, who is an employee of Marliss, and who is Marty Liss’s lawyer. Letra picked up on the option, paying in full by certified check to Palm Coast National. Because the actual sale of the land was contingent on its being able to be developed, apparently Lew Traff and the contractor, Cole Kimber, and that group, had worked out the necessary permissions, and they had a contingency approval of a building permit, based on acquisition of the land in question, with all the plans and drawings and specs on file.

  “After they got all their ducks in a row, they started the land clearing and the dredging bright and early on a Saturday morning earlier this month. Every conservationist started jumping up and down like a flock of demented hens, but by the time they could get any kind of ear to listen to them it was Monday morning, and too damned late to do anything about anything. You can’t save a tree when it has been knocked down, bulldozed into a pile and soaked with old crankcase oil. Nobody even knew who had ordered it done. Let me explain one thing. If all the building trades people were on full time and overtime, like they were up until early last year, maybe a big stink could have been raised. But there is unemployment, and the real estate agents and the real estate lawyers are crying, and the banks are very nervous about a lot of the paper they are holding. Opposing a big new project on one of the keys is not a popular stance in Florida these days.”

  “Even though that project will go up on very fragile land?”

  “If they can get it up and sell it out before the big waves come, that’s all they want.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I try to believe two or three impossible things every day.”

  “You can’t block water when it wants to go somewhere. All you can do is give it an easier choice, where it won’t do as much harm. But in this case there is not one single area in the low and narrow and central part of the key which does not have structures either on it or too close to it. A good job of deepening and widening the passes would help a lot.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how far down the priority list we are on that federal function.”

  “I can guess.”

  “Sam Harrison, I am still not clear about what the hell it is you want to accomplish by talking to me.”

  Harrison smiled. “Not too damned sure myself. I’m in the business of building things. And I am a specialist in the ways of protecting structures from the sea. I guess it would be personally offensive to me to have the public at large think that my profession is so inept and unaware that we would build a few hundred million dollars’ worth of high-rise living units on a fragile sandspit without knowing what will happen. There are whores in my profession, just as in yours. These structures look so substantial, people are going to be misled. Call it a professional conscience, or something. I would just like them to know they are in such peril that when a hurricane alert is sounded they should get the hell off that key and go well inland.”

  “And I am to be Henny Penny?” Mick asked.

  “A big feature story, with maps, photos and overlay, and a signed report from me to backstop you.”

  “Let’s suppose I could sneak it into the paper. It would need perfect timing. If I try to sneak it in and miss, I get my ass fired out of here. If it does get in, I get my ass fired out of here. Even if it does get in, it could be a one-day wonder, a story that surfaces and disappears and nobody gives a good God damn, like the wire-service stories about predictions of the end of the world. Or it could turn into a sensational story, wire-service pickups, panic on the key, legal action and all that. The developers with unsold apartments will be screaming with fury. Purchasers of the apartments will be suing the developers. People will be backing out of sales contracts. Raw land on the key will fall out of bed. A lot of people will want blood. Mine and yours.”

  “I am a certified, qualified expert, and I can give expert testimony.”

  “Want to hear about my house?”

  “Your house?”

  “It’s what you call a ranchette. Four acres eight miles east of Athens, on State Road 757. The land was a wedding present from Patty’s daddy six years ago. Three years ago we put up one of those Jim Walter houses on it, finished on the outside, and it took us two years to get the inside finished off. It’s fenced. There’s a stand of big Georgia pines. Mike is four and Dinah is two. I rented a little bulldozer and in one long weekend I dug a big pond. It’s stocked. And we’ve got some ducks on it.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “I got another raise this year. And they don’t mind my doing a little outside work on the side. PR work. Are you married, Sam?”

  “Once upon a time. No kids.”

  “What was it you heard me call myself? The environmental conscience around here? On the other hand, Harrison, why don’t you go move people away from the San Andreas fault? Why don’t you move them off the slopes of Vesuvius? God damn it, why are you nagging me?”

  “Don’t get yourself in an uproar.”

  “The thing is, you can’t be absolutely sure.”

  “What would you do if I was?”

  Mick Rhoades thought it over. “I guess I would do like those owners of those condominiums are going to do, absolutely nothing. Sorry. Very sorry. I told you I get in a good lick now and then. I also kiss ass. Whenever necessary.”

  “Is it okay if I understand exactly what you mean?”

  “I’d almost rather you didn’t. Four years ago, sure. Maybe even three, it was possible. But not since then.”

  “Well … I better be going.”

  “Listen, if I can find any way to get the message across …”

  “Sure. Thanks. Thanks, Mick. Take care of yourself.”

  26

  WHEN THE SATURDAY-EVENING sun had moved low enough to fill the big living room of Apartment 7-A with bright glare, Barbara Messenger had gotten up and gone to the windows and run the long pale draperies across the floor-length windows.

  Lee Messenger and Gus Garver had talked it all out with Sam Harrison, had studied the maps and photographs, had checked his assumptions and had decided he was right.

  “Unless,” as Gus had said, “another area near here becomes more vulnerable and takes the heat off us.”

  “Becomes narrower and lower?” Messenger said. “Little chance of that. Do either of you men know the law on such matters? Could the Association here send a registered letter to the developers, saying that the land clearing has created a clear and obvious danger to the Golden Sands property?”

  “That’s what you do when your neighbor has a broken seawall and won’t get it fixed. There has to be some action he can take in response, to correct the situation,” Sam explained. “Even if he covered those fourteen acres with two feet of concrete, I don’t think there would be the same resistance to erosion and guttering as when all those living roots were holding onto the soil. And I do not think you could claim that a hurricane is inevitable, not in any legal sense.”

  “Can I look at that storm track chart again?” Messenger asked. Sam took it from his portfolio, unfolded it and handed it to the old man. It charted all hurricanes in the Southeast from 1907 on. Prior to the year they began giving them names, the dotted line showing the path of the eye of the storm was identified merely by month and year.

  The lines wove a disorderly web entrapping the peninsula. Sam stood behind the old man and pointed at the lines, those few of them which, over the years, had come up through the Straits of Yucatán between Cuba and Mexico, into the Gulf, and had then curved back to a northeasterly direction and intersected the Florida coast, and said, “This chart is misleading because each line should be a broad band, as broad as the range of destructive winds in t
he particular hurricane being charted. Six of those broad bands would have touched this key in the past thirty years, even though no eye came really close. It makes the residents think they were in a hurricane, when actually it missed them. Notice that these three here were not as destructive because the eye came ashore south of here. The great winds move counterclockwise around the eye. When the eye moves ashore from west to east, the winds south of the eye slam the shoreline with the velocity of the winds themselves plus the forward movement of the storm. If the winds are gusting at one hundred mph, and the storm is moving at twenty, these winds south of the eye will hit at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. The winds north of the eye will be reduced by two forces, the normal reduction due to moving across land and reduction caused by subtracting the forward movement of the storm. You can have a fifty-mile-an-hour differential between winds ten miles south of the eye and ten miles north of the eye. Of course, the big problem here is the way the water will pile ashore south of the eye. The worst thing that could ever happen to the West Coast of Florida would be to have a major hurricane follow the coastline right from the Ten Thousand Islands up to Cedar Key, with the eye never coming ashore, with the eye staying five or ten miles offshore. It would scour the keys clean, like a big brush. With the state of readiness right now, it would take a month just to count the bodies.”

  “You serious, Sam?” Gus asked, startled.

  “You can believe it.”

  “I thought that with the search planes and all, they could predict the paths of these things,” Messenger said. “What happened here, for God’s sake?”

  “That one? It went through Cedar Key and flattened it and came on back through it and stomped the ruins, and then went thirty miles and turned and came back through it again. Very rare. The atmospheric conditions were in balance. There was no low-pressure area for the storm to move toward, no high-pressure ridge for it to follow. So it was in equilibrium. The normal pattern in this hemisphere is for a storm to start near the equator, over heated waters, and move due west, lifting a little bit north and adding more northward movement the farther it gets from the equator. It is the rotational effect. The hurricane is spun off. The average track has a boomerang shape, with a tendency to curve back on itself when it gets far enough north, like a plume, like an ostrich feather.”