The boat had stopped vibrating, and he took a wondering look around, then, shrugging, went below. He finished making his sandwich, cleaned up and went out on the deck to eat. Noticing a couple of lobster traps that had shifted, he secured them with a line, then as he stepped back into the wheelhouse, he experienced a sudden unpleasant stomach-sinking sensation, as if someone had pushed the Up button in a fast elevator. He grabbed onto the mechanical hauler to keep his footing. The boat plunged, then levitated again, higher this time, plummeted once more and repeated the cycle a third time before sinking back into the sea, where it rocked violently from side to side.

After a few minutes, the motion stopped and the boat stabilized, and Jenkins saw a flickering movement in the distance. Retrieving his binoculars from the wheelhouse, he swept the sea, and as he adjusted the focus ring, he saw three dark furrows extending from north to south. The ranks of waves were moving in the direction of the coast. A long-dormant alarm bell clanged in his head. It can't be. His mind raced back to that July day in 1998 off the coast of Papua New Guinea. He had been on a ship, making a survey, when there had been a mysterious explosion and the seismic instruments had gone crazy, indicating a disturbance on the seafloor. Recognizing the symptoms of a tsunami, the scientists aboard the ship had tried to warn the coast, but many of the villages had no communication. The huge waves had flattened the villages like a giant steamroller. The destruction was horrifying. Jenkins never forgot the sight of bodies impaled on mangrove branches, of crocodiles preying on the dead.

The radio crackled with a chorus of hard-edged Maine accents as fishermen set the airways abuzz. “Whoa!” said a voice Jenkins recognized as that of his neighbor, Elwood Smalley. “Hear that big boomer?”

“Sounded like a jet fighter, only underwater,” another fisherman said.

“Anyone else feel those big seas?” said a third man.

“Yup,” replied a laconic veteran lobsterman named Homer Gudgeon. “Thought for a time there I was on a roller coaster!”

Jenkins barely heard the other voices chiming in. He dug a pocket calculator out of a drawer, estimated the time between the waves and their height, did some quick calculations and glanced with disbelief at the numbers. Then he picked up the cell phone he used when he didn't want personal messages to go over the marine channel and punched out a number.

The gravelly voice of Charlie Howes, Rocky Cove's police chief, came on the phone.

“Charlie, thank God I got you!”

“In my cruiser on my way to the station, Roy. You calling to crow about whippin' me at chess last night?”

“Another time,” Jenkins said. “I'm east of Rocky Point. Look, Charlie, we don't have much time. There's a big wave heading right toward town.”