About the AuthorBoyd Morrison has a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and has worked for NASA, Microsofts Xbox Games Group, and Thomson-RCA. In 2003, he fulfilled a lifelong dream and became a Jeopardy! champion. He is also a professional actor who has appeared in commercials, stage plays, and films. He lives with his wife in Seattle.Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.CHAPTER 1MEMORIAL DAY8:41 A.M.CAPTAIN MICHAEL ROBB OPENED his eyes and found himself lying on the cockpit floor. Heat washed over him as if the airliner had been plunged into a blast furnace, and multiple warning horns blared. Blood trickled from his brow, stinging his eye. For a second he lay there, dazed, wondering what had happened. Then he remembered. The impact.He had just returned to the cockpit, swearing off coffee for the rest of the trip. It had been his third trip to the lavatory, and the flight from Los Angeles to Sydney wasnt even halfway over. His copilot, Wendy Jacobs, a good twenty years younger than he, had smirked at him but said nothing. He had been about to climb back into his seat when a streak of light flashed by the airliners starboard wing.Robb thought it was a lightning strike from the storm they were flying above, but then the plane was thrown sideways, as if batted away by a giant hand. A sonic boom blasted the plane, and he smacked into the bulkhead, his head and shoulder taking most of the blow.He must have been out for only a few seconds. Though his mind was still fuzzy, his vision quickly came back into focus. Robb sat up and wiped the blood from his eye. The instrument panel was intact. Jacobs had disengaged the autopilot and grabbed the yoke, which she now fought for control. Robb pulled himself to his feet. He had no idea how badly he was injured, but he was moving. That was enough.As Robb clambered into his seat, he glanced at the cabin differential pressure gauge. Its needle was pegged at zero. Explosive decompression.Reflexively, he reached for the mask hanging to his left, years of training taking over. His shoulder protested the motion, and he winced in pain.Oxygen masks on, one hundred percent! he shouted.Robb pulled the mask over his head, and Jacobs did the same. The masks in the passenger compartment had already dropped automatically. He mentally raced through the possibilities for the blast. A terrorist bomb? Missile attack? Fuel tank explosion? To depressurize that fast, some of the passenger windows must have blown out, maybe an entire door. The aircraft was still flying though, so that meant the fuselage was intact.With his attention focused on getting the airliner under control, there was no time for Robb to talk to the passengers. The flight attendants would have to deal with them. The best thing he could do for the passengers was to get the plane down to ten thousand feet, where there was breathable air.He pushed the yoke forward and silenced the decompression horn, but another one continued to wail. The lights for the starboard engines flashed red, meaning both were on fire.Pull number three engine T-handle! Robb barked out. He suppressed the panic edging into his voice.Jacobs pulled the handle and pressed the button beneath it, extinguishing the fire. She glanced out the starboard window to make a visual check.Fires out on number three engine! Number four engine is completely gone!Gone?Sheared off from the pylon.Robb cursed under his breath. His 747400 was certified to fly with only three engines, but with just the two port engines theyd be lucky to stay in the air.He turned to Jacobs. Her face was ashen but otherwise professional.Issue the distress call, Robb said.Jacobs nodded, understanding the implications. Even if someone heard the radio call, it would make little difference. The best they could hope for was to report their position in case they had to ditch. She keyed the radio.Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is TransPac 823. We are going down. We are going down. Weve lost both number three and number four engines. Our position is seventy-five miles bearing two four five from Palmyra VOR.No answer, just static.Activate the emergency transponder, Robb said. He knew activating it was a useless procedure. They were beyond the range of any radar units.Setting transponder to 7700 in squawk emergency, Jacobs replied.As their rapid descent took the plane through thirty thousand feet, an unearthly glow bloomed within the cloud cover ten miles to their right. At first the clouds softened it, but then the light pierced them, shooting toward the stratosphere, for a moment brighter than the sun.What the hell? Jacobs said.A fireball rolled upward in the distinctive mushroom shape Robb had seen in countless photos. He gaped, mesmerized by the sight. Atomic weapons testing in the Pacific had been outlawed for years, and there were no volcanoes in this region of the ocean. What else could have caused such a massive explosion?Whatever it was, the explanation didnt matter.Roll left! he yelled. Stabilizing the plane should have been his highest priority, but they had to get away from the blast zone.Rolling left, came Jacobss response after only a seconds hesitation.Robb just had to hope that he could ride out the shock wave and find someplace to land. They had passed over the Palmyra Atoll only ten minutes before, but the runway built during World War II had been abandoned decades earlier. Christmas Island, five hundred miles away, had the closest operational runway. Despite all the damage the plane had sustained, it was still flying. They might make it.Come on, you bastard! Robb grunted as he strained at the controls.The nose of the enormous plane came around slowly. Too slowly.The blast wave from the explosion caught up with them and slapped at the plane from behind, heaving its tail up. A colossal crack of thunder hammered the aircraft. The windows shattered and wind howled through the cockpit. The number one engine was wrenched from its mounts, shearing half the port wing from the plane and setting the fuel tanks aflame. The plane plummeted like an elevator cut from its cable.With two engines gone and another shut down, the airliner was mortally wounded. Thinking of the 373 men, women, and children in the planepeople who were his responsibilityRobb didnt give up, but he had no more hope of flying it than one of the passengers. He battled the controls trying to level the plane, but it was a dead stick. Despite his efforts, the plane spun downward in a death spiral. By the time the airliner plunged through the lowest cloud layer, the altimeter read one thousand feet. For the first time in an hour, Robb could see the blue water of the Pacific.Realizing that their fate was inevitable, Robb let go of the yoke and sat back. He held out his hand to Jacobs, who grasped it tightly with her own. Never much for religion, Robb nonetheless closed his eyes and found himself reciting the Lords Prayer. He was up to the words Thy kingdom come when the plane slammed into the ocean at over five hundred miles per hour. 2010 Boyd Morrison where can i download ebooks for free without signing up Rogue Wave
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Tsunami - oh, I want my mommy!By Cheryl StoutI love disaster and end-of-the-world novels/movies. I think both are life affirming guilty pleasures. If I read about these awful happenings, of course they will never happen to me. AND if they do, I will darn sure be prepared to save myself and my loved ones."Rogue Wave" started with non-stop action from page one and it didn't let up throughout the whole book. I felt like I was reading through a shopping list of plots for disaster movies - meteorite hits the earth; airliner crashes; island gets swallowed up; skyscrapers collapse; multiple tsunamis threaten mankind. Sounds exciting, huh? Well, Morrison did a good job holding my interest and keeping the pages action packed.The scientific information seemed well researched and was presented well all through the book. I read that the author has an engineering background and also an acting background and that shows in the book. I can very well visualize this being made into a movie.SPOILER ALERT:A few of my minuses because I would probably rate this 4.5 stars if I was able to: 1. Some of the characters could have been developed more fully. It makes for a more effective story if you know more about, and develop positive feelings for, characters in the disaster genre before they get killed. It was difficult to feel too sad when some of the main characters were killed when I didn't know too much about them and hadn't developed any type of rapport for them. 2. The timeline was absurdly rushed. There is no way Honolulu could have been evacuated of the hundreds of thousands of residents and tourists in the time allotted in the novel. I've been there during rush hour traffic - I know. And this is a big city; walking to safety in the time allowed wouldn't have happened either especially with the disorganization of the emergency workers. 3. As a parent, would you let your 13 year old daughter and her best friend wander off with no cell phones of their own and with your cell phone not being charged? On Waikiki Beach with all the teenage boys and two boy-crazy girls? Not likely. 4. The plane rescue scenario at the end of the book was just a bit too far fetched for me - again because of time restraints.Either more time should have been allowed for the evacuation (arrival of tsunamis) or less people should have made it to safety and should have died. It would have been more believable.I did enjoy this book a lot. I don't want this to read like I didn't. I read fiction for a reason and I mostly enjoy far-fetched fiction. So I have to suspend my credulity quite often when I read. And that's okay. What's really nice, though, is when I can read a book such as this and not have niggling issues raise their bobbling little heads.I thought this book was much better than Morrison's The Ark although I enjoyed that book also. I think the character development was better in "The Ark".1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. A fantastic book that keeps you glued to the edge of your seat. A+By Donald T.Rogue Wave is a stand-alone novel by thriller writer Boyd Morrison. This is the fourth book I've read by Morrison and while I've enjoyed all of them, I enjoyed this one the most of all of them. Rogue Wave is about a Tsunami headed for the Hawaiian Islands. These waves were caused by an undetected asteroid that collided with Earth somewhere in the pacific ocean. The resulting Tsunami is one of the largest in recorded history and Dr. Tanaka and his team must race against time to warn the islands of the disaster headed their way, while also trying to save themselves and their families.Rogue Wave is non-stop action, last minute rescues, heartbreaking losses, and edge of your seat reading. It's one of those books that you'd like to curl up with and read cover to cover in one sitting. Morrison does and excellent job of painting a believable "worst case" scenario and then brings that scenario to life. The characters are well developed and because of that, it's heartbreaking as you lose them throughout the story. Morrison has a great book here and it's one that would probably make a fantastic movie. It's completely deserving of a five start rating. Well done. A+1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. An average first tryBy ricocMy understanding is that this was Morrison's first published book. New authors don't always get it right the first time, and Morrison is no exception. Halfway through the book, I just wanted it to end. I started to feel like I was watching an old RKO radio serial, the ones with a cliffhanger at the end of every episode, and you had to wait for the next one to find out how our intrepid heroes got out of their predicaments. I was no longer interested in the perils of the main characters. As one reviewer mentioned, you had to be a Navy Seal to accomplish some of the actions his characters performed. Toward the end, while I sympathized with their various plights, I just didn't care anymore. But I did learn a lot about tsunamis.The author's Tyler Locke series read much better, and I can recommend them. This book, not so much.