Finally satisfied there was no mistake, Yaeger sagged wearily in his chair and shook his head. “Oh my God,” he murmured. “Oh my God.”
Admiral Sandecker had to force himself not to work on Sundays. A hyper-workaholic, he ran ten kilometers every morning and performed light workouts after lunch to work off excess energy. Sleeping but four hours a night, he put in long, grueling days that would inflict burnout on most other men. Long divorced, with a daughter living with her husband and three children on the other side of the world in Hong Kong, he was far from lonely. Considered a prime catch by the older single women of Washington, he was inundated by invitations to intimate dinners and parties of the social elite. As much as he enjoyed the company of ladies, NUMA was his love, his passion. The marine science agency took the place of a family. It was spawned by him and bred into a giant institution revered and respected around the world.
Sundays, he cruised along the shores of the Potomac River in an old Navy double-ender whaleboat he had bought surplus and rebuilt. The arched bow brushed aside the murky brown water as he cut the wheel to dodge a piece of driftwood. There was history attached to the little eight-meter vessel. Sandecker had documented her chronology from the time she was built in 1936 at a small boatyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and then transported to Newport News, Virginia, where she was loaded on board the newly launched aircraft carrier Enterprise. Through the war years and many battles in the South Pacific, she served as Admiral Bull Halsey’s personal shore boat. In 1958, when the Enterprise was decommissioned and scrapped, the aging double-ender was left to rot in a storage area behind the New York Shipyard. It was there Sandecker found and bought the worn remains. He then beautifully restored her with loving care until she looked like the day she came out of that boatyard in New Hampshire.
As he listened to the soft chugging from the ancient four-cylinder Buda diesel engine, he reflected on events of the past week and contemplated his actions for the week to follow. His most pressing concern was Arthur Dorsett’s greed-inspired acoustic plague, which was devastating the Pacific Ocean. This problem was closely followed by the unanticipated abduction of Pitt and Giordino and their subsequent disappearance. He was deeply troubled that neither dilemma was blessed with even a clue toward a solution.
The members of Congress he had approached had refused his pleas to take drastic measures to stop Arthur Dorsett before his guilt was ironclad. In their minds there simply was not enough evidence to tie him to the mass deaths. Reasoning that was fueled by Dorsett’s highly paid lobbyists. Par for the course, thought a frustrated Sandecker. The bureaucrats never acted until it was too late. The only hope left was to persuade the President to take action, but without the support of two or more prominent members of Congress, that was also a lost cause.
A light snow fell over the river, coating the barren trees and winter-dead growth on the ground. His was the only boat in sight on the water that wintry day. The afternoon sky was ice blue and the air sharp and quite cold. Sandecker turned up the collar of a well-worn Navy peacoat, pulled a black stocking cap down over his ears and swung the whaleboat toward the pier along the Maryland shore where he kept it docked. As he approached from upriver, he saw a figure get out of the warm comfort of a four-wheel-drive Jeep and walk across the dock. Even at a distance of five hundred meters he easily recognized the strange hurried gait of Rudi Gunn.
Sandecker slipped the whaleboat across the current and slowed the old Buda diesel to a notch above idle. As he neared the dock, he could see the grim expression on Gunn’s bespectacled face. He suppressed a rising chill of dread and dropped the rubber bumpers over the port side of the hull. Then he threw a line to Gunn, who pulled the boat parallel to the dock before tying off the bow and stern to cleats bolted to the gray wood.
The admiral removed a boat cover from a locker, and Gunn helped him stretch it over the boat’s railings. When they finished and Sandecker stepped onto the dock, neither man had yet spoken. Gunn looked down at the whaleboat.
“If you ever want to sell her, I’ll be the first in line with a checkbook.”
Sandecker looked at him and knew Gunn was hurting inside. “You didn’t drive out here just to admire the boat.”
Gunn stepped to the end of the dock and gazed grimly out over the murky river. “The latest report since Dirk and Al were snatched from the Ocean Angler in Wellington is not good.”
“Let’s have it.”
“Ten hours after Dorsett’s yacht vanished off our satellite cameras—”
“The reconnaissance satellites lost them?” Sandecker interrupted angrily.
“Our military intelligence networks do not exactly consider the Southern Hemisphere a hotbed of hostile activity,” Gunn replied acidly. “Budgets being what they are, no satellites with the ability to photograph the earth in detail are in orbits able to cover the seas south of Australia.”
“I should have considered that,” Sandecker muttered in disappointment. “Please go on.”
“The National Security Agency intercepted a satellite phone call from Arthur Dorsett aboard his yacht to his superintendent of operations on Gladiator Island, a Jack Ferguson. The message said that Dirk, Al and Maeve Fletcher were set adrift in a small, powerless boat in the sea far below the fiftieth parallel, where the Indian Ocean meets the Tasman Sea. The exact position wasn’t given. Dorsett went on to say that he was returning to his private island.”
“He placed his own daughter in a life-threatening situation?” Sandecker muttered, incredulous. “I find that unthinkable. Are you sure the message was interpreted correctly?”
“There is no mistake,” said Gunn.
“That’s cold-blooded murder,” muttered Sandecker. “That means they were cast off on the edge of the Roaring Forties. Gale-force winds sweep those latitudes most of the year.”
“It gets worse,” said Gunn solemnly. “Dorsett left them drifting helplessly in the path of a typhoon.”
“How long ago?”
“They’ve been adrift over forty-eight hours.”
Sandecker shook his head. “If they survived intact, they’d be incredibly difficult to find.”
“More like impossible when you throw in the fact that neither our Navy nor the Aussies’ have any ships or aircraft available for a search.”
“Do you believe that?”
Gunn shook his head. “Not for a minute.”
“What are their chances of being spotted by a passing ship?” asked Sandecker.
“They’re nowhere near any shipping lanes. Except for the rare vessel transporting supplies to a subcontinent research station, the only other ships are occasional whalers. The sea between Australia and Antarctica is a virtual wasteland. Their odds of being picked up are slim.”
There was something tired, defeated about Rudi Gunn. If they were a football team with Sandecker as coach, Pitt as quarterback and Giordino as an offensive tackle, Gunn would be their man high in the booth, analyzing the plays and sending them down to the field. He was indispensable, always spirited; Sandecker was surprised to see him so depressed.
“I take it you don’t give them much chance for survival.”
“Three people on a small raft adrift, besieged by howling winds and towering seas. Should they miraculously survive the typhoon, then comes the onslaught of thirst and hunger. Dirk and Al have come back from the dead on more than one occasion in the past, but I fear that this time the forces of nature have declared war on them.”
“If I know Dirk,” Sandecker said irrefutably, “he’d spit right in the eye of the storm and stay alive if he has to paddle that raft all the way to San Francisco.” He shoved his hands deep in the pockets of his old peacoat. “Alert any NUMA research vessels within five thousand kilometers and send them into the area.”
“If you’ll forgive me for saying so, Admiral, it’s a case of too little, too late.”
“I’ll not stop there.” Sandecker’s eyes blazed with intent. “I’m going to demand that a massive search be launched,
or by God I’ll make the Navy and the Air Force wish they never existed.”
Yaeger tracked down Sandecker at the admiral’s favorite restaurant, a little out-of-the-way ale and steak house below Washington, where he was having a somber dinner with Gunn. When the compact Motorola Iridium wireless receiver in his pocket beeped, Sandecker paused, washed down a bite of filet mignon with a glass of wine and answered the call. “This is Sandecker.”
“Hiram Yaeger, Admiral. Sorry to bother you.”
“No need for apologies, Hiram. I know you wouldn’t contact me outside the office if it wasn’t urgent.”
“Is it convenient for you to come to the data center?”
“Too important to tell me over the phone?”
“Yes, sir. Wireless communication has unwanted ears. Without sounding overdramatic, it is critical that I brief you in private.”
“Rudi Gunn and I will be there in half an hour.” Sandecker slipped the phone back into the pocket of his coat and resumed eating.
“Bad news?” asked Gunn.
“If I read between the lines correctly, Hiram has gathered new data on the acoustic plague. He wants to brief us at the data center.”
“I hope the news is good.”
“Not from the tone of his voice,” Sandecker said soberly. “I suspect he discovered something none of us wants to know.”
Yaeger was slouched in his chair, feet stretched out, contemplating the image on an oversized video display computer terminal when Sandecker and Gunn walked into his private office. He turned and greeted them without rising from his chair.
“What do you have for us?” Sandecker asked, not wasting words.
Yaeger straightened and nodded at the video screen. “I’ve arrived at a method for estimating convergence positions for the acoustic energy emanating from Dorsett’s mining operations.”
“Good work, Hiram,” said Gunn, pulling up a chair and staring at the screen. “Have you determined where the next convergence will be?”
Yaeger nodded. “I have, but first, let me explain the process.” He typed in a series of commands and then sat back. “The speed of sound through seawater varies with the temperatures of the sea and the hydrostatic pressure at different depths. The deeper you go and the heavier the column of water above, the faster sound travels. There are a hundred other variables I could go into, dealing with atmospheric conditions, seasonal differences, convergence-zone propagation access and the formation of sound caustics, but I’ll keep it simple and illustrate my findings.”
The image on the viewing screen displayed a chart of the Pacific Ocean, with four green lines, beginning at the locations of the Dorsett mines and intersecting at Seymour Island in the Antarctic. “I began by working backward to the source from the point where the acoustic plague struck. Tackling the hardest nut to crack, Seymour Island, because it actually sits around the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula in the Weddell Sea, which is part of the South Atlantic, I determined that deep ocean sound rays were reflected by the mountainous geology on the seafloor. This was kind of a fluke and didn’t fit the normal pattern. Having established a method, I calculated the occurrence of a more elementary event, the one that killed the crew of the Mentawai.”
“That was off Howland Island, almost dead center in the Pacific Ocean,” commented Sandecker.
“Far simpler to compute than the Seymour convergence,” said Yaeger as he typed in the data that altered the screen to show four blue lines beginning from Kunghit, Gladiator, Easter and the Komandorskie Islands and meeting off Howland Island. Then he added four additional lines in red. “The intersection of convergence zones that wiped out the Russian fishing fleet northeast of Hawaii,” he explained.
“So where do you fix the next convergence-zone inter section?” asked Gunn.
“If conditions are stable for the next three days, the latest death spot should be about here.”
The lines, this time in yellow, met nine hundred kilo meters south of Easter Island.
“Not much danger of it striking a passing ship in that part of the ocean,” mused Sandecker. “Just to be on the safe side, I’ll issue a warning for all ships to detour around the area.”
Gunn moved in closer to the screen. “What is your degree of error?”
“Plus or minus twelve kilometers,” answered Yaeger “And the circumference where death occurs?”
“We’re looking at a diameter anywhere from forty to ninety kilometers, depending on the energy of the sound rays after traveling great distances.”
“The numbers of sea creatures caught in such a large area must be enormous.”
“How far in advance can you predict a convergence zone intersection?” Sandecker queried.
“Ocean conditions are tricky to predict as it is,” replied Yaeger. “I can’t guarantee a reasonably accurate projection beyond thirty days into the future. After that; it becomes a crapshoot.”
“Have you calculated any other convergence sites beyond the next one?”
“Seventeen days from now.” Yaeger glanced at a large calendar with a picture of a lovely girl in a tight skirt sitting at a computer. “February twenty-second.”
“That soon.”
Yaeger looked at the admiral, a polar-cold expression on his face. “I was saving the worst till last.” His fingers played over the keyboard. “Gentlemen, I give you February twenty-second and a catastrophe of staggering magnitude.”
They were not prepared for what flashed on the screen. What Sandecker and Gunn saw on the video screen was an unthinkable event they had no control over, an encircling web of disaster that they could see no way to stop. They stared in sick fascination at the four purple lines that met and crossed on the screen.
“There can be no mistake?” asked Gunn.
“I’ve run my calculations over thirty times,” said Yaeger wearily, “trying to find a flaw, an error, a variable that will prove me wrong. No matter how I shake and bake it, the result always comes out the same.”
“God, no,” whispered Sandecker. “Not there, not of all places in the middle of a vast and empty ocean.”
“Unless some unpredictable upheaval of nature alters the sea and atmosphere,” said Yaeger quietly, “the convergence zones will intersect approximately fifteen kilometers off the city of Honolulu.”
This President, unlike his predecessor, made decisions quickly and firmly without vacillating. He refused to take part in advisory meetings that took forever and accomplished little or nothing, and he particularly disliked aides running around lamenting or cheering the latest presidential polls. Conferences to build defenses against criticism from the media or the public failed to shake him. He was set on accomplishing as much as possible in four years. If he failed, then no amount of rhetoric, no sugarcoated excuses or casting the blame on the opposing party would win him another election. Party hacks tore their hair and pleaded with him to present a more receptive image, but he ignored them and went about the business of governing in the nation’s interest without giving a second thought to whose toes he stepped on.
Sandecker’s request to see the President hadn’t impressed White House Chief of Staff Wilbur Hutton. He was quite impervious to such requests from anyone who wasn’t one of the party leaders of Congress or the Vice President. Even members of the President’s own cabinet had difficulty in arranging a face-to-face meeting. Hutton pursued his job as Executive Office gatekeeper overzealously.
Hutton was not a man who was easily intimidated. He was as big and beefy as a Saturday night arena wrestler. He kept his thinning blond hair carefully trimmed in a crewcut. With a head and face like an egg dyed red, he stared from limpid smoke-blue eyes that were always fixed ahead and never darted from side to side. A graduate of Arizona State with a doctorate in economics from Stanford, he was known to be quite testy and abrupt with anyone who bragged of coming from an Ivy League school.
Unlike many White House aides, he held members of the Pentagon in great respect. Having enlisted and served as an infantrym
an in the Army and with an enviable record of heroism during the Gulf War, he had a fondness for the military. Generals and admirals consistently received more courteous recognition than dark-suited politicians.
“Jim, it’s always good to see you.” He greeted Sandecker warmly despite the fact that the admiral showed up unannounced. “Your request to see the President sounded urgent, but I’m afraid he has a full schedule. You needn’t have made a special trip for nothing.”
Sandecker smiled, then turned serious. “My mission is too delicate to explain over the phone, Will. There is no time to go through channels. The fewer people who know about the danger, the better.”
Hutton motioned Sandecker to a chair as he walked over and closed the door to his office. “Forgive me for sounding cold and heartless, but I hear that story with frequent regularity.”
“Here’s one you haven’t heard. Sixteen days from now every man, woman and child in the city of Honolulu and on most of the island of Oahu will be dead.”
Sandecker felt Hutton’s eyes delving into the back of his head. “Oh, come now, Jim. What is this all about?”
“My scientists and data analysts at NUMA have cracked the mystery behind the menace that’s killing people and devastating the sea life in the Pacific Ocean.”
Sandecker opened his briefcase and laid a folder on Hutton’s desk. “Here is a report on our findings. We call it the acoustic plague because the deaths are caused by high-intensity sound rays that are concentrated by refraction. This extraordinary energy then propagates through the sea until it converges and surfaces, killing anyone and anything within a radius up to ninety kilometers.”
Hutton said nothing for a few moments, wondering for a brief instant if the admiral had slipped off the deep end, but only for an instant. He had known Sandecker too long not to take him as a serious, no-nonsense man dedicated to his job. He opened the cover of the report and scanned the contents while the admiral sat patiently. At last he looked up.
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