Godzilla: The Official Movie Novelization

THREE

1999

The alarm clock jolted Ford Brody from sleep. One minute he’d been dreaming about riding a dragon through outer space, the next he found himself back in his bedroom in suburban Japan. Dawn streamed through the window curtains. Only nine years old, the boy smacked the snooze button on the clock and buried his face back into his pillow. Maybe he could get in a few more moments of sleep before his mom dragged him out of bed.

Then he remembered what day it was.

His eyes lit up and a mischievous smile spread across his face. He slid out of bed and tiptoed across the floor, which was littered with toy soldiers, tanks, and dinosaurs. Just last night, right before going to bed, he’d staged an epic battle between the miniature army-men and a ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex. As usual, the dinosaur had won…

The glow of a heat lamp caught Ford’s eyes. Despite his big plans for the morning, he detoured over to his terrarium to check on the butterfly cocoon dangling from a branch inside the glass case. To his slight disappointment, the cocoon had not hatched overnight. He impatiently tapped on the glass, trying to provoke a response, but the pupa inside the cocoon refused to cooperate.

Oh well, Ford thought, shrugging. Maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, he had other business to attend to. There was a reason he had set the alarm to wake him up an hour early. He had a lot to accomplish before his dad woke up.

But as he snuck out into the hall, still in his pajamas, he was dismayed to hear Joe Brody’s voice coming from his office at the end of the corridor. Creeping closer, Ford saw his dad pacing back and forth across the work-filled office, talking urgently into the phone:

“—I’m asking — Takashi—Takashi—I’m asking for the meeting because I don’t know what’s going on. If I could explain it, I’d write a memo.”

Shaking his head, Joe ran a hand through his unruly reddish-brown hair. Early morning stubble dotted his anxious face. Glasses perched on his nose. He threw an exasperated look at Ford’s mom, Sandra, who hovered in the doorway to the office, listening intently to her husband’s side of the conversation. Her short black hair needed combing, and she had a robe on over her nightgown. Ford didn’t understand what the problem was, but he figured it had something to with his parents’ work at the nuclear power plant. The family had relocated from San Francisco a few years ago so that they could both get good jobs at the plant.

“Because Hayato said it had to come from you,” Joe said impatiently.

His mom heard Ford shuffling behind her. She turned away from the office to spot him in the hallway. He crept up beside her, distraught over this unexpected turn of events.

“He’s awake?” he whispered.

Her face transformed in an instant, going from concerned professional to sympathetic mom right away. She knelt down to look Ford in the eye. She mussed his light brown hair.

“I know!” she whispered back. “He got up early.”

Ford’s heart sank. Of all mornings for there to be a problem at the plant. “What’re we gonna do?”

“Get dressed,” she instructed him, flashing a conspiratorial smile. “I’ll figure it out.”

Sandra watched her son scamper back to his room before turning her attention back to more grown-up affairs. Joe barely looked up as she re-entered the office, which was neatly organized despite all the graphs and reports piled about. Printouts of an unidentified waveform pattern were spread out atop his desk, alongside a stack of zip disks.

“… my data starts two weeks ago,” he explained into the phone. “I’ve got fourteen days of anomalous signal; pulsing between seventy five and a hundred kilohertz, then suddenly today it’s like the same thing but an echo. I’ve ruled out the turbines, internal leakage, we’ve checked every local RF, TV and microwave transponder. I’m still sitting here with two hundred hours of graph I can’t explain.” He paused, listening to someone at the other end of the line. “No—No—the fact that it’s stopped is not reassuring. That’s not good, that’s not the message here.”

He belatedly noticed Sandra waiting by the doorway. He placed a hand over the phone’s receiver. “What’s going on?”

“Your birthday?” she reminded him. “Someone is preparing your ‘surprise’ party…”

Understanding dawned on his face, but she could tell this was the last thing on his mind right now. Flustered, he nodded at her, acknowledging that he’d gotten the message, but making no effort to get off the phone. He held up his hand, signaling that he needed a few more minutes.

Sandra frowned, giving him a gently chiding look, but let him get back to his call. Lord knew she understood how troubling this new data was. She shared her husband’s worries.

“… But that’s — hang on—that’s exactly my point,” he insisted. “The moment these pulses stopped is when we started having the tremors.” He irritably shuffled a stack of zip disks from his desk. “With all due respect, Takashi, and honor. Respect and honor. With all of that, okay? I’m an engineer and I don’t like coincidences and I don’t like unexplained frequency patterning near a plant that’s my responsibility. I need a meeting. Make it happen.”

He was still arguing with Takashi as she left to check on Ford, who had already gotten into his school uniform. They waited until Joe disappeared into the master bedroom to change for work, then hurriedly hung a string of cardboard letters over the archway of the office door. The handmade sign read: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!”

Grinning, she and Ford admired their work. They high-fived each other. Ford beamed in anticipation of his dad’s reaction.

But when Joe emerged from the bedroom, freshly shaven and wearing a suit and tie, he walked right by the banner without even noticing. His phone was glued to his ear and he spoke rapidly in Japanese on his way out the front door. “Come on,” he called out to Sandra and Ford, switching back to English. “We gotta go!”

Crushed, Ford looked up at Sandra. “It rocks,” she assured him. “He’ll see it when he gets home, I promise.”

Her comforting words appeared to do the trick. The absolute trust on his face tugged at her heart. Nodding, he grabbed his backpack and dashed out the door after his father. Sandra followed them, vowing to herself that, freaky signals or no freaky signals, she would see to it that her son was not disappointed.

Besides, it was Joe’s birthday after all. He deserved a celebration — after he got the higher-ups at the plant to listen to him.

“Later, Dad!”

Ford sprinted past the family car on his way to the bus stop. Seated behind the wheel, Joe waved distractedly at the boy, while wrapping up his call.

“Good. Finally,” he said in Japanese. “Thank you.”

Sandra slid into the passenger seat beside him. She clipped a “Janjira Power” ID badge to the lapel of her jacket and handed a matching badge to Joe.

“He made you a sign, you know.”

A sign? A pang of guilt stabbed Joe as he realized what she meant, and that he had been utterly oblivious to whatever she and Ford had cooked up for his birthday. Contrite, he put down his phone and looked over at his wife. He’d had no idea …

“He worked so hard,” she said. “I think what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna come home early. I’ll take the car and pick him up and we can get a proper cake.”

Joe was grateful that she was on top of this — and letting him off so easily. “I’m gonna practice being surprised all day. I promise.”

To prove his sincerity, he generated his best “Holy Shit!” expression. His eyes bugged out and his jaw dropped as though he had just won the lottery. The effort teased a laugh from Sandra. He smirked back at her, enjoying the moment. Which couldn’t last, unfortunately. Not with the matter preying on his mind.

“Look,” he said, “I need to know it’s not the sensors. I can’t call this meeting and look like the American maniac. We get in, don’t even come upstairs, just grab a team and head down to Level 5—do 5 and the coolant cask — just check my sensors. Make sure they’re working.”

“You’re not a maniac,” she assured him. “I mean, you are, just not about this.”

He appreciated her effort to lighten the mood, but he had too much on his mind to joke around right now. “There’s got to be something we’re not thinking of.”

“Happy birthday,” she said stubbornly.

He turned toward her. An infectious smile penetrated the cloud hanging over him, and reminded him just how lucky he really was. The corners of his lips lifted.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied.

She leaned forward and kissed him warmly on the lips. Despite all his worries and frustration, he responded to the kiss, keeping it going even as he fired up the ignition. They reluctantly disengaged as he pulled away from the curb and headed towards the plant, which loomed prominently on the horizon.

His birthday would have to wait.

The Janjira Nuclear Power Plant perched above the coastline, dominating the skyline overlooking the Sea of Japan. Thick white plumes of steam vented from the plant’s cooling towers, while the reactors themselves were secured within three imposing structures of steel and concrete that had been built to withstand even a crashing 747. Adjoining buildings housed the turbines, generators, pumps, water tanks, storage units, machine shops, administrative offices, and other essentials. A row of transmission towers rose from the switchyard adjacent to the plant. High-voltage power lines transmitted freshly generated electricity to the nearby city and points beyond.

After parking the car in the lot, Joe and Sandra hurried off on their respective tasks. Within minutes, Joe was marching briskly down a corridor, trailed by Stan Walsh, his best friend and partner in crime. Another transplanted American, Stan was a few years older than Joe, who was counting on Stan to back him up when they met with Hayato and the others. Joe gulped down black coffee on the run. “#1 DAD” was emblazoned on his mug, a title Joe doubted he was entitled to this morning.

I’ll make it up to Ford later, he promised himself, after I get to the bottom of this.

A local engineer, Sachio Maki, hurried up to Joe with an anxious expression on his face. He nervously thrust a file of reports at Joe. Juggling his coffee cup, Joe flipped through the folder, which contained some seismographic readings he had never seen before. His eyes bugged out for real this time.

“Whoa.” He froze in his tracks, caught off-guard by the data. “What is that?”

“Yes,” Maki confirmed. “Seismic anomaly.”

The region had been experiencing a number of small underground tremors recently, but nothing this dramatic. “This is from when?” Joe asked urgently.

“Now,” Maki said. “This is now.”

Joe blinked, not quite grasping the truth. When Maki said “now” did he really mean…?

“This graph is minutes, not days,” Maki explained, spelling it out. “This is now.”

“What?”

“Wait,” Stan said, trying to keep up. “Seismic’ as in what? As in earthquakes?” He peered over Joe’s shoulders at the graphs. “Are those earthquakes?”

Joe shook his head. “Earthquakes are random, jagged. This is steady, increasing.” He flipped rapidly through the remainder of the report, his eyes tracing the steady upward path of the vibrations’ intensity over time. “This is a pattern.”

Just like the inexplicable signals he had been monitoring.

Following Joe’s instructions, Sandra headed straight for the sub-level corridors beneath the primary reactor building, pausing only briefly before a large open doorway. Warning signs, printed in Japanese, marked the boundary before them. This was where the buck stopped: the containment threshold where sturdy barriers could be deployed to seal off the area beyond in the event of a significant radiation leak. While the existence of the barriers should have been reassuring, the necessity of them was something she generally preferred not to think about. There hadn’t been a Chernobyl-type disaster since 1986, thirteen years ago, but nobody in the industry wanted to take any chances.

She had rounded up a four-person team to assist her in the inspection. They quickly climbed into full-body radiation suits, as required by the Level 5 safety protocols. Multiple layers of thick protective material, along with a self-contained breathing apparatus, made the uncomfortable suit both hot and heavy to work in. Internal helmet lights illuminated their faces. Sandra took pains to maintain a cool, confident expression on hers.

“Alright,” she said, leading the way. “Let’s make this quick.”

Caught up in the anomalous new seismic data, Joe moved more slowly down the hall toward his meeting. He barely registered Stan fretting beside him.

“Can I be your Rabbi here for a minute?” Stan pleaded, sounding like he was on the verge of another ulcer. He popped an antacid. “Before you go in there and pull some China Syndrome freakout on these guys, keep in mind that we are hired guns here, okay?”

Joe understood that Stan was worried about their contracts and careers, but there were bigger issues at stake here, like the safety of the plant and the surrounding community.

“I have operational authority in my contract, Stan.”

This didn’t seem to allay Stan’s anxieties. If anything, he sounded even more apprehensive. “You pull this off-line, it’ll be three months before we get back up.”

You think I don’t know that, Joe thought, but before he could reply the fluorescent lights flickered overhead. Joe glanced up in confusion. Now what?

A second later, a sudden rumble shook the entire building.

The tremor hit even harder down on Level 5. Sandra’s team froze in surprise. One of her team members, Toyoaki Yamato, looked at her in alarm. “What was that?”

The overhead lights flickered momentarily, but then the subterranean rumbling stopped. Sandra held her breath for a moment, waiting to see if the tremor had truly subsided, before taking charge again. She tried her best to keep her voice steady.

“Just a little farther,” she stated. “Let’s check the cask and get out of here.”

The other workers nodded and quickened their pace. Nobody wanted to linger in the containment area longer than possible.

Including Sandra.

Joe could feel the tension in the plant’s control room the minute he and Stan arrived. Banks of sophisticated control panels, gauges, and monitors, manned by a crew of largely Japanese technicians, lined the walls of the chamber, while the main work desk occupied the center of the room. Windows looked over the plant grounds. Glass partitions isolated various support cubicles. Anxious voices exchanged technical data in Japanese.

Joe spotted the men in charge, Haruo Takashi and Ren Hayato, huddled over a bank of monitors. All eyes turned toward Joe, the hubbub of voices quieting somewhat. He could tell right away that there was more bad news coming.

Some birthday this is turning out to be.

“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded.

Takashi turned to face him. The Deputy Plant Administrator was a slim young man, who looked like he was having a bad day as well. “Maybe not such a good time for a meeting,” he suggested.

“Agreed,” Joe said, pushing the seismic graphs on Takashi. “Have you seen this?”

Takashi nodded toward the bank of monitors he had been glued to before. Hayato, the Senior Reactor Engineer, stepped aside so that Joe could see for himself. Joe immediately recognized the distinctive waveform snaking and pulsing across the monitors. It was the same pattern that he had been staring at for days.

“Do we have a source?” he asked crisply. “Where’s the epicenter?”

Takashi threw up his hands. He was more rattled than Joe had ever seen him. “We keep trying… nothing…”

Joe shook his head. “It’s got to be centered somewhere.”

Hayato spoke up. “No one else is reporting. We’ve contacted every other plant in the Kanto region, Tokai, Fujiyama… they’re unaffected.”

Joe wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad. “Are we at full function?”

Takashi nodded. “Perhaps we should be drawing down. To be safe.”

“Is that my call?” Joe asked.

“Right now, maybe yes,” Hayato conceded. He was an older man with graying temples, only a few years from retirement. “We’re trying to reach Mr. Mori, but he’s not answering.”

Joe wasn’t inclined to wait on the owner of the company. Those weren’t profit-and-loss charts on the monitors. This was a safety issue.

As though to drive that point home, another tremor rattled the building. This one was felt even harder and sharper than before. Joe felt the weight of dozens of eyes upon him. He made up his mind.

“Take us off-line,” he said.

Stan balked. A shutdown could cost millions — and possibly their jobs. “Joe…”

“Do it. Wind it down.” He issued the order in Japanese. “Seal down the reactors.”

There was a brief moment of hesitation before the room erupted into a quiet frenzy of activity. Joe suddenly found himself at the eye of storm, overseeing emergency measures he had expected to go his entire career without implementing. The full import of his decision hit home and he felt weak in the knees. A cold sweat glued his shirt to his back. What if he had over-reacted and pulled the plug too soon? This could be the biggest mistake of his career…

Breathe, he reminded himself. Think.

He put down his coffee cup on a nearby table, figuring that his heart was already racing fast enough, thank you very much. Diagrams and blueprints were strewn across the table, along with a selection of walkie-talkies on a tray. He snatched one up and started scanning through the channels, searching for a signal. He needed info and he needed it now, damnit.

And he needed to know that Sandra was okay.

Before he could get hold of her, the mug started vibrating across the table, spilling coffee onto the blueprints, which were also shaking as well. Joe glanced in alarm at the monitors, where the pulse pattern was spiking into a new shape. A stronger, secondary jolt, accompanied by a deep sonic thrum that Joe could feel all the way to his teeth, rattled the glass windows of the control room. The walls shook.

Even worse, all the monitors and other electronics lost power for a second, briefly killing the lights, before they popped back on again. Startled technicians swore and shouted and scrambled to check their systems. Agitated voices competed with each other, everybody talking at once.

“No status!” Takashi blurted. “Everything’s rebooting!”

“Calm,” Joe insisted, trying to maintain order. “No yelling.”

Takashi got the message, settling down. He regained his composure as Joe raised his voice to be heard over the clamor.

“All personnel not needed for SLCS procedure should begin to evacuate the plant,” Joe announced. “You know the drill.” SLCS referred to the Standby Liquid Control System, which could be deployed to shut down the reactors in case the control rods failed to insert. He waited long enough to see his order being carried out before raising the walkie-talkie to his lips. A recorded announcement blared over the intercoms in the background. He placed a hand over his ear to tune it out. “Sandra? Sandy, can you hear me? You need to get back up here!”

At first there was no response, as he urgently spun through the channels, but then he heard his wife’s voice over the receiver, broken up by bursts of static:

“—ear me… anyone co… this is… report… damage to t—”