Toby Swett was a confirmed catastrophist. He had always known he would witness the Last Days. What he hadn't known was that he would be in the center of the storm, that his sudden, irresistible passion for a woman glimpsed in a restaurant would set in motion the most cataclysmic terrorist attack ever devised. An attack on the planet itself. Nuclear devices have been planted under the Antarctic ice which, when detonated, will raise the seas 120 feet, inundating New York and Tokyo, obliterating a third of Asia and the Nile Delta, shrinking the world's coastlines, altering the weather forever, and wiping out two thirds of humanity. The Flood, redux. It is insane; and yet, insanity has become the norm. Ever since the Frenzy - the millenarian riots at the turn of the century - people have been expecting the worst. Ravaged by cults and climate shifts, AIDS and Ebola, environmental collapse and ethnic hatred, America is cowering under the authoritarian protection of the Federal Anti-Terror Bureau and other, even more brutal forces. The world has been breathlessly awaiting the next disaster. And now, here it is...