compensated with dramatic content for what they lacked in coherency.
Six hours earlier, prior to the arrival of the rain along the coastline of the Americas, the crew of a French marine-research ship had witnessed the sudden birth of a spectacular waterspout three hundred miles southwest of Tahiti. The twister spun down from a cumulonimbus mass about three miles off the ship's starboard flank, and grew with astonishing rapidity until the funnel point, sucking at the ocean, broadened to an estimated six hundred meters, more than a third of a mile.
Digital video, shot by a crew member and uploaded through the vessel's satellite link, revealed a formation of daunting size. A scientist aboard the research ship estimated that the tornado-like form measured three miles in diameter where the highest point of the vertical updraft disappeared into the clouds.
'Sweet Jesus,' Neil whispered.
In these scenes, neither the sea nor the massive column of water churning into the sky was touched by the mysterious luminescence.
Nevertheless, the extraordinary rain, now drumming beyond the blinded windows, must somehow be related to this gigantic waterspout videotaped earlier in the far reaches of the South Pacific. Although Molly couldn't understand the connection, the worldwide character of these events sharpened her anxiety.
On TV, the raging Pacific vortex spun off mean weather. The day darkened rapidly, as if God had applied a heavy finger to a celestial rheostat. Great claws of lightning tore at the ocean.
If the video frame had included any object with which to compare the funnel, the scale of the phenomenon would have been not merely breathtaking but terrifying. She could sense the cameraman's fear when the twister began to move toward his ship.
As if rocked with anger and pain as the lightning slashed its great dark hide, the sea thrashed and heaved. The ship dropped into a fearsome trough, a chasm.
The bow dug into the floor of the trough. Tons of water broke over the railing and churned across the deck.
Battered by this surge, the cameraman's legs were nearly swept out from under him. He kept his balance and staggered off the open deck as the ship abruptly shuddered and rose along the steep face of a colossal swell.
The starlet reporter, Veronica, appeared on the screen again to say that following the transmission of the preceding video, the French ship had not been heard from again.
Jack, her co-anchor, expressed concern for the crew and then, with mindless conviction, concluded that they were certainly safe because 'those marine-research guys really know their way around the sea.'
Through a smile as constant as that of a ventriloquist's wooden partner, Veronica revealed that she had spent one semester of college aboard a sailing vessel in an at-sea learning program.
Molly wanted to scream at them, as if her voice might travel back along a microwave path to New York City or Washington, or to wherever they were located. She wanted to rock them out of their self-satisfied journalistic detachment, which always seemed to her to be merely smug superiority and emotional indifference masquerading as professionalism.
Additional video had been recorded and transmitted via satellite by military personnel aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier currently under way three hundred miles due west of Japan. This tape documented the astonishingly swift development of a dense cloud cover out of a previously clear sky.
Subsequently, at three points of the compass, within sight of observers aboard the aircraft carrier, waterspouts had formed. The diameter of their funnels grew rapidly until each was larger than the single twister captured on video by the French. An officer aboard the carrier, unable to keep either the awe or the tremor of fear out of his voice, added narration to the incredible visuals.
Again, neither the sea nor the spinning funnels revealed any trace of the scintillation that characterized the falling rain.
Impossibly, reports of giant waterspouts were also coming in from ships in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, though these were not supported by video.
Obviously reading from a TelePrompTer, in a pedantic but still ingratiating tone, Veronica said, 'Although waterspouts appear to be twisting tubes of solid water, they consist of mist and spray, and are not as formidable as they look.'
'However,' Jack chimed in, 'relying on sophisticated computer analysis of Doppler-radar images, technicians aboard the Ronald Reagan determined that the spouts under their observation did not conform to any known models of the phenomenon. These are nearly solid forms, and Dr. Randolph Templeton, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, who joined us in the studio just a short while ago, estimates that each of these funnels is drawing water from the sea at the rate of a hundred thousand gallons per minute.'
'More,' said Templeton when he came on-screen. 'Twice that, at least.' He had the good sense not to smile.
In the meteorologist's eyes, Molly saw the measured fear of an informed intelligence.
Needing to touch Neil, she put a hand on his shoulder, and was less reassured than usual by his solid physique.
With furrowed brow, in a solemn voice, Jack asked Dr. Templeton if these phenomena were the result of global warming.
'The vast majority of meteorologists don't believe there is any global warming,' Templeton replied with a note of impatience, 'at least not any that isn't natural and cyclical.'
Jack and Veronica both appeared dumbfounded by this statement, and before a producer could murmur a suitable comeback question in their earpieces, they both looked simultaneously at the ceiling of the broadcast studio.
'A very hard rain has just begun falling here in Washington,' said Veronica.
'Remarkably hard,' Jack agreed. Apparently, the producer at last whispered in his earpiece, for Jack turned to the meteorologist. 'But Dr. Templeton, everyone knows the effect of greenhouse gases-'
'What everyone knows is bunk,' Templeton said, 'and if we're going to get a handle on this, what we need right now is analysis based on real science, not-'
Neil thumbed the remote control repeatedly until he found one of the three major networks, which had belatedly risen to the crisis like a shark to a swimmer.
The anchorman was older than the pair on cable news, and famous. He preened with self-importance as he interviewed a specialist in satellite-data analysis.
According to the bio line on the bottom of the screen, the expert was Dr. Sanford Nguyen. He worked for the same government agency that employed Randolph Templeton, who was at that moment debating global warming with Jack and Veronica on another channel.
The anchorman was surely being fed questions by an unseen producer and a first-rate team of researchers, but his inquiries rolled off his golden tongue as though he himself were a maven of orbital data-recovery systems.
Dr. Nguyen made the unsettling revelation that three hours prior to the observation of the extraordinary waterspouts, all orbital assets of the National Weather Service and other federal agencies had gone blind. Evidently, industry-owned satellites with high-resolution photographic capability were out of commission, as well. No high- altitude photographic, infrared, or radar images of the waterspouts were available to suggest why and how these phenomena had occurred.
'What about military satellites, the missile trackers?' Molly wondered. 'What about spy satellites?'
'They'll have been blinded, too,' Neil predicted.
On the TV, the anchorman asked Dr. Nguyen if a burst of cosmic radiation or perhaps unusually intense sunspot activity could have fried the circuitry in all those eyes in the sky.
'No,' Nguyen assured him. 'That can't be the explanation. Besides, it's too coincidental. Neither cosmic radiation nor magnetic pulses could have precipitated the calamitous weather we're seeing, and I'm sure that whatever blinded our satellites is the cause also of those waterspouts and these storms.'
Puckering his face into his most solemn of all expressions, the network anchorman said, 'Dr. Nguyen, are we seeing at last the terrible consequences of global warming?'
Nguyen's expression suggested contempt but also sudden bewilderment at the unanswerable question he must have been asking himself: What the hell am I doing here?
Molly said, 'Why would only observation satellites be out of commission?' She gestured toward the TV.
