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believed that he would always manage to
get through whatever happened to him. His smile was kind, and his friends often
found his insouciance, despite any given disaster, as one of his most endearing
yet infuriating traits.
    In
front of him, were a multitude of meteorology reports.
    Even
after having discussed the weather with the three brightest meteorologists in
the world, the best information he could gather was not much better than what
had been available when he was a child.
    There
was a cyclone heading towards the northeast coastline of Australia, and
depending on where it hit, there would almost certainly be a lot of damage to
people, buildings and the environment.
    All
the science that was designed to protect them could sink right to the ocean
floor, for all its usefulness today.
    Tom
had spent four years in Florida as a young boy while his father was posted
there with the Navy.
    He
knew all about hurricanes, and he always hated them.
    As
a boy, he promised himself that he was going to move as far from water as
possible. When he finished secondary school, he joined the Marines as a helicopter
pilot, happy to have distanced himself from the sea and the risk of hurricanes.
    Not
long after his initial training, he served in Afghanistan, where he mainly
performed Hot Drops with Navy SEALS and Medevacs. It was dangerous work, but at
least there was no enormous body of water below him. 
    Two
years ago, his chopper had been shot down. Of the twenty men aboard her, he was
the only one to survive. It was pure luck, nothing more. There wasn’t anything
he could have done to change that outcome. He should have been killed with the
rest of them. When he attended their funerals, he felt no desire to change
places with any one of the good men who had sacrificed their lives so that
America could protect its way of living for future generations.
    He
felt no survivor guilt, but all the same, when he looked at their loved ones,
their wives, children, parents, brothers and sisters, there was simply a deep
well of pain inside him, which could never be repaired even with the military
might of the U.S. Marines.
    Tom
tried to continue on with his military career, but it was pointless.
    Much
to the concern of his father, Tom eventually applied for an honorable discharge
from the U.S. Marines. It had taken months for his discharge to be finalized.
As a highly awarded helicopter pilot, with three separate tours of duty to the Sand
Pit under his belt, he could only assume that despite his father being adamant
that he would not intervene, he was indeed responsible for the delay. When it
eventually came through, Tom signed the paperwork, handed in the last of his
uniforms, and walked home from the base.
    When
he arrived home, Sam Reilly was there waiting for him, with a job offer he
couldn’t resist.
    Although
they had been childhood neighbors, they came from very different walks of life;
both struggling with their unusual vicissitudes with equal enthusiasm and
tenacity. Tom’s own father was an Admiral in the Navy, and although he earned a
salary well into six figures, and was even on a first name basis with a number
of Senators and Congressmen, was considered relatively poor in comparison to
the others living in the affluent community of La Jolla, California.
    Sam,
on the other hand, had more money than he would ever get to spend in his
lifetime. The two men shared a similar love for cave diving since childhood.
Once they reached adulthood, much to the disappointment of his friend’s father,
Sam decided to join Tom, and the two became cadet helicopter pilots never
had any aspirations to reach Flag rank in forty years’ of service to the Marine Corps.
    The
two of them completed their pilot training and Sam had even served the start of
one tour of duty in Afghanistan with him. But then, for no reason that anyone
could comprehend, Sam had returned stateside and completed his studies at MIT.
There had been some unsavory sentiment throughout