Wildfire by Chris Ryan Page A

do.’
    ‘I’m working out if we’ve got enough fuel.’
    ‘Why? Are we going to run out?’
    Kelly did some silent calculations before she answered him. ‘No. We’ve got plenty. We’re going to follow the Ghan.’
    Further down the coast, in Melbourne, the weather reporting station was hosting a crisis meeting. Themayor, the police chief and the head of the Melbourne fire department were gathered in the tiny office of the chief meteorologist discussing whether they should put their city on alert.
    The meteorologist was pointing to a series of satellite images of Adelaide showing how the fire had progressed. In the final one, taken a couple of minutes earlier, the entire landscape was black, blotted out by clouds of smoke.
    The fire chief spoke first: ‘This fire should not be this bad. It should have been containable.’
    His comment sent ripples of surprise through the cramped room.
    ‘I agree,’ said the meteorologist. ‘Let me show you …’ She cursored back, looking for a picture. ‘It seems to have got dramatically worse when the weather changed.’ She pointed out the features on the screen – the distinctive coastline of Adelaide. ‘This is Port Adelaide here, the Murray river – we can see by the cloud formations that it’s a hot, still day. The anemometers around the city confirm it; hardly any breeze at all.’
    The fire chief pointed to some dark smudges on thepicture. ‘You can see there are a few bush fires, but look at the smoke – they’re not going anywhere. They would burn out safely if they were managed properly.’
    The meteorologist took up the story. ‘But now, if we look at this …’ She scrolled along to another picture. ‘This was ten minutes later.’
    The audience gasped. The clouds had become black and white streaks swirling in an angry vortex. It looked like a picture of a hurricane.
    ‘It must be some mistake,’ said the police chief. ‘It can’t be the same day.’
    ‘That’s what I thought,’ said the meteorologist. ‘But there’s no mistake. From nowhere we’ve got winds of up to a hundred k.p.h. When those winds blew up, that’s when the fire really took hold.’
    The chief of police sighed. ‘Why didn’t the fore-casters give us any warning of this?’
    The meteorologist shook her head. ‘They didn’t know it was coming.’
    The mayor looked incredulous. ‘A wind can’t just spring up out of nowhere. We’ve got half a billion dollars worth of satellite equipment to track this kind of thing!’
    The meteorologist replied calmly, ‘I agree with you. Something like that doesn’t just sneak up unannounced. That’s why I looked at the records myself. I looked at the exact same information the Adelaide forecasters had and I ran a computer simulation. And I came to the same conclusion as they did – that it would be a hot, still day.’
    The mayor folded his arms. He looked very unhappy. ‘So it’s another spell of freak weather? We seem to be getting rather a lot of that.’
    ‘We normally try to think in more scientific terms than that,’ replied the chief meteorologist, ‘but there’s no explanation for this. We don’t know why the weather changed. But when it did, it meant nothing short of disaster for Adelaide.’
    Someone else was also taking a keen interest in weather satellite pictures of Adelaide. In a lab far more spacious than the monitoring station in Melbourne, two military scientists were looking closely at a screen, squinting to see it in the bright sunshine that streamed in through the window. They wore faded blue uniforms; the name tag on one said GRISHKEVICH, the other’s said HIJKOOP. Around them was a bank of computer monitors and electronic equipment, all emblazoned with the insignia of the US army. On racks of machinery around the walls, red and green LEDs flashed a constant pulse like heart-beat monitors, and glowing digital displays counted up and down. Whatever was going on in that room was very complex and needed expert