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spectacular waterspout three hundred miles southwest of Tahiti. The twister spun down from a cumulonimbus mass about three miles off the ship's starboard flank, and grew with astonishing rapidity until the funnel point, sucking at the ocean, broadened to an estimated six hundred meters, more than a third of a mile.
        Digital video, shot by a crew member and uploaded through the vessel's satellite link, revealed a formation of daunting size. A scientist aboard the research ship estimated that the tornado-like form measured three miles in diameter where the highest point of the vertical updraft disappeared into the clouds.
        "Sweet Jesus," Neil whispered.
        In these scenes, neither the sea nor the massive column of water churning into the sky was touched by the mysterious luminescence.
        Nevertheless, the extraordinary rain, now drumming beyond the blinded windows, must somehow be related to this gigantic waterspout videotaped earlier in the far reaches of the South Pacific. Although Molly couldn't understand the connection, the worldwide character of these events sharpened her anxiety.
        On TV, the raging Pacific vortex spun off mean weather. The day darkened rapidly, as if God had applied a heavy finger to a celestial rheostat. Great claws of lightning tore at the ocean.
        If the video frame had included any object with which to compare the funnel, the scale of the phenomenon would have been not merely breathtaking but terrifying. She could sense the cameraman's fear when the twister began to move toward his ship.
        As if rocked with anger and pain as the lightning slashed its great dark hide, the sea thrashed and heaved. The ship dropped into a fearsome trough, a chasm.
        The bow dug into the floor of the trough. Tons of water broke over the railing and churned across the deck.
        Battered by this surge, the cameraman's legs were nearly swept out from under him. He kept his balance and staggered off the open deck as the ship abruptly shuddered and rose along the steep face of a colossal swell.
        The starlet reporter, Veronica, appeared on the screen again to say that following the transmission of the preceding video, the French ship had not been heard from again.
        Jack, her co-anchor, expressed concern for the crew and then, with mindless conviction, concluded that they were certainly safe because "those marine-research guys really know their way around the sea."
        Through a smile as constant as that of a ventriloquist's wooden partner, Veronica revealed that she had spent one semester of college aboard a sailing vessel in an at-sea learning program.
        Molly wanted to scream at them, as if her voice might travel back along a microwave path to New York City or Washington, or to wherever they were located. She wanted to rock them out of their self-satisfied journalistic detachment, which always seemed to her to be merely smug superiority and emotional indifference masquerading as professionalism.
        Additional video had been recorded and transmitted via satellite by military personnel aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier currently under way three hundred miles due west of Japan. This tape documented the astonishingly swift development of a dense cloud cover out of a previously clear sky.
        Subsequently, at three points of the compass, within sight of observers aboard the aircraft carrier, waterspouts had formed. The diameter of their funnels grew rapidly until each was larger than the single twister captured on video by the French. An officer aboard the carrier, unable to keep either the awe or the tremor of fear out of his voice, added narration to the incredible visuals.
        Again, neither the sea nor the spinning funnels revealed any trace of the scintillation that characterized the falling rain.
        Impossibly, reports of giant waterspouts were also coming in from ships in the Atlantic Ocean and the