Fresh readings were fed from the instrument clusters via satellite every few minutes—as close to real time as anyone could desire. The problem was that the clusters lying out there on the sea floor were spread roughly fifty miles apart, so nothing of note would show up on the monitors until the wave passed over them. The reading on the tide gauge jumped to four feet, then dropped to minus the same amount. “You see that?” “I did,” Dolan replied, writing it down. Then he did some quick math, which Collins had already finished in her head. “It’s traveling at—” “Roughly two hundred miles per hour,” she said. “Yep. Damn.” Collins nodded, waiting for the next reading, which would be in about ten minutes. And it wouldn’t come from the wave the instruments just “saw”—it would come from the one that followed. She now had the unenviable task of telling the governor of New Jersey that the typical tsunami consisted of not one wave but many, the first four being the most destructive, with each more powerful than the one before it.
