200 kilometers of the coast and 9,000 meters below the Pacific Ocean’s surface the
Okhotsk Plate and Pacific Plate met at the bottom of the Japan Trench—a relative of the
Ring of Fire, which stretches in a horseshoe 40,000 kilometers from New Zealand, north
to Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Japan, Russia, and then east across the Aleutian
Islands to the coast of Alaska and then south down the coast of Canada and North and
South America to end near the bottom of Chile. It is littered with 452 active and dormant
volcanoes and is home to 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes.
If one were to use a submersible, one would see a labyrinth of jagged gullies torn
into the stone cliffs by millions of years of tectonic pressure. At the bottom, the Okhotsk
Plate would be bent like a fist against the Pacific Plate readying itself to snap open and
dislodge billions of tonnes of water upwards.
**
Captain Mackeller was eating breakfast in the ship’s galley when his face suddenly
drained of color.
“Are you OK?” asked his copilot.
“Look at the TV,” he replied, pointing.
The copilot turned and looked at the screen mounted on the wall. The newscaster
was pointing to a map of Japan where an earthquake had just hit. “So what? This country
is plagued with earthquakes.”
“I saw this in my dream. We were sitting here having breakfast just like this.”
The copilot’s eyebrows rose. “Then what happened?”
Mackeller looked at him a long while. A medium built man, blues eyes with a
hawk like nose that jutted from a weathered face. He had been his copilot for over two
years and was his closest friend. “It happens today.”
“What happens?” he asked incredulously.
Mackeller looked him straight in the eyes as if he had no doubt. “The earthquake
and tsunami that cause the nuclear disaster.”
The copilot ran his hands over his short-cropped hair. “Are you sure?”
Mackeller nodded.