“I think you should contact them right away.”
He glanced at his watch. “I can’t do it now; I have my appraisal in ten minutes. I’ll do it first thing this afternoon.”
At the door he paused and turned. “Did you say anything to Jake – about the ammonia, I mean?”
“Of course not – I’d have looked a right idiot!” She shrugged. “Well, I didn’t believe it myself at that stage. All I said was I’d found it in a river sample a friend brought in.”
“I’d keep it that way for the moment.”
“Why?”
He chewed his lip. “I don’t know. Talk to you later.”
CHAPTER 5
Professor Brian Harthill, Head of the Department of Physics, bent over the stapled set of sheets on the desk in front of him. Terry waited patiently, vaguely noting the way the window light reflected from the man’s scalp through the thinning hair. He’d completed that appraisal form before leaving for the conference in Cardiff. It was an annual chore. He had a lot of sympathy for Brian: the administrative burden of the headship had wiped him out as a researcher. The poor chap would have to repeat this exercise with every member of staff in the Department. All over the university, other heads of department would be doing the same thing. Terry let his mind wander.
Before I take it to the Environment Agency I need to find some other way of checking those rivers…
“Grants?” Harthill asked.
Terry quickly gathered his thoughts. “My European Commission grant is still current, Brian. It’s worth 8.9 million Euros.”
“Yes, but you’re just one participant and it only has two more years to run.” He looked up. “You know, Terry, it would be in your interest to have something in your own name. At this stage you’re probably thinking about promotion. I’ve got to have some ammunition if I’m going to put your case forward to Faculty – and that’s just the first hurdle. There’ll only be a few Senior Lectureships awarded and you’ll be in competition with other staff from all over the university. I’d say you need a personal grant.”
“All right, I’ll think about it.”
The Salmon and Trout Association. They’d know something about those rivers…
“What about publications? Anything this year?”
“Um, there’ll be a good paper coming out of Maria’s work.”
Harthill pointed to the form. “You mention a review article here. That’s the sort of thing, you know. Establishes you as an international scholar. Have you started to write it yet?”
“Not yet.”
Brian scratched at the short grey beard that looked not so much intentional as the result of having forgotten to shave for a week. He made a few notes then put down his glasses. “Try to make a start on that review, Terry. It’ll be good for you and good for us. We’ve got to make sure of the Department’s rating in the next round.”
He sighed. “I’ll try, but it’s a question of time. I have a pretty heavy teaching load.”
“You do quite a bit in another department, don’t you? This Instrumentation course in Biology.”
“They need to know how to measure things too, Brian. The Department gets credited for the time spent. Anyway that’s not the problem. I’m still running Electricity and Magnetism for First and Second Year Physics. That’s the real killer. It’s a mammoth course.”
“Yes, I know. It got starred in the Teaching Quality Assessment. Well done.”
“The TQA was horrendous – it generated paperwork a mile high. I’ve been teaching that course for five years now. Any chance of offloading it onto someone else?”
It was a fair question. Formally the performance appraisal was intended to be “enabling”, designed to ensure that people achieved their potential. In actuality, of course, it was just another way of cracking the whip.
“I’ll look at it, but we’re short staffed as it is.”
It was the answer he’d expected. It was no good blaming Brian; it wasn’t his fault. He was probably under pressure from the Dean, and no doubt the Dean was under pressure from the Vice-Chancellor, who in his turn needed good departmental ratings to increase the research allocation to the university. It was the dead hand of managerialism, which the government laid on the universities and the universities in their turn laid on their staff.
When he got back to his room he found a manuscript on his desk. It was the first draft of the paper Maria had prepared on the work she’d presented at the conference. He glanced at the first couple of pages then put it in his brief case to deal with at home.
He turned to his computer and typed “Salmon and Trout Association” into Google. It was a good web site, giving him access to a range of fisheries and water companies. He started to make phone calls.
An hour later he sat back and looked at his scribbled notes. It seemed he’d been on the right track after all. Of the suspect rivers he’d picked up from the magazine reports, the Rheidol was actually all right; the correspondent had died and they hadn’t yet found anyone to replace him which was why the reports were missing. The others, the Mawddach, Dysynni, Gwendraeth Fawr, Loughor and the Camel, all had problems.
He checked his watch. He needed to contact the Environment Agency.
The man he spoke to was polite at first but when Terry pressed him harder he almost sighed.
“Yes, thank you very much. As I said, we’re aware of the problem and we have it under review.”
“Look, I’m sorry, but I’m not sure you fully appreciate the scale of the pollution this could cause.”
“We deal with this sort of thing all the time, Mr. McCarthy.”
Terry’s patience was beginning to wear thin. “It’s McKinley. Dr. McKinley.”
“May I ask if you’ve looked at our website?”
“Yes I have, but it only tells me who you’ve prosecuted successfully for pollution. It doesn’t tell me what I want to know.”
“Which is...?”
Terry ran his fingers through his hair. “Which is: what’s the full extent of the problem in these rivers and how much staff time are you allocating to it?”
There was a pause. Then the man said, “I’ve said a number of times, Mr. MacInroy, that we do have the problem under review. Now, we appreciate your concern but I think it would be best if you let us tackle it in our own way.” And he rang off.
Terry slammed the receiver down and glared at the phone. Then he started as it rang. He picked it up and almost barked:
“McKinley!”
“Oh. Terry? Is this a bad time?”
“Sorry, Maggie, what’s up?”
“I was wondering if you’d spoken to the Environment Agency yet.”
“Yes, I just got off the phone from them.” He glanced at his watch. “Tell you what – I’ll come over. Could you put some coffee on?”
Maggie had a small room adjacent to her lab where her research students could work and make coffee. She poured a mug for Terry and one for herself and they carried them across the corridor to her office. She placed the mug on her desk and settled into a chair, fluffing her hair in that habitual way which he found himself beginning to like, even if it didn’t achieve anything noticeable.
“So how did you get on?”
“Not too well, I’m afraid. He kept laying platitudes on me. When I pushed him harder he rang off.”
Her lips twisted. “Pity. Did he say how far it’s spread?”
“I don’t think he had a clue, but actually I have. I’ve looked up local fishing reports for England and Wales and checked them with the Salmon and Trout Association.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Good thinking. What did you find out?”
“They’ve got the problem in four Welsh rivers and one in Cornwall. Nothing on the North Sea side; all the affected rivers drain into the Atlantic.”
“Wales and Cornwall? So it’s not confined to one area?”
“No. That was true within Wales too. You’d get a couple of polluted rivers and the ones in between were okay. Weird, is
n’t it?”
She was looking at him intently, her eyes even darker than usual.
“What?”
She drew a deep breath.
“Look, Terry, we’ve got a strange organism here, something that produces ammonia hand over fist. What are the chances that it popped up spontaneously in half a dozen places at the same time?”
“Small.”
She looked at him.
“OK, tiny.”
“Right, so it must have arisen in one place and spread to the others.”
“Seems so.”
“Then how does it come to be in rivers miles apart and yet not in the ones in between?”
“That’s what I was wondering. Any ideas?”
“There’s only one explanation I can think of. This problem didn’t start here.”
CHAPTER 6
When Terry got back to his office he sat with his chin in his hands, turning it over in his mind. There was nothing wrong with Maggie’s reasoning; if he hadn’t been so hung up on factory pollution earlier he might have reached the same conclusion himself. The organism had to have a common source and if the affected rivers were some distance apart it had to be somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean. But no sooner had he accepted that as the solution than Maggie had come up with an even bigger problem.
Some organisms lived in fresh water and some in sea water. A few could live in both, but Nostoc wasn’t one of them. So they had a freshwater organism producing ammonia in the river, yet everything pointed to a source out at sea. Something was missing – but what?
He’d left her to think about it and he would try to follow up on the source, but there wasn’t a lot to go on.
Whatever it is, it’s somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, presumably some sort of organism. It could be concentrated in one place or spread more thinly. It could be producing ammonia, but it wouldn’t have to be: that might happen only after the transfer to a freshwater environment.
He shook his head; too many possibilities. What he needed to do was generate a few hypotheses and test them. He could start with the most likely scenario: a patch of the stuff somewhere in the ocean, producing ammonia.
Would something like that show up from space? Almost certainly. Remote sensing of ammonia was possible over very large distances – he was familiar with the technology through his own research. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft had measured the abundance of ammonia in Jupiter’s atmosphere while on its way to Saturn, so traces in Earth’s own atmosphere would surely have been mapped by NASA’s surveillance satellites.
He accessed the NASA web site. The only satellite photographs of any relevance were ones showing algal blooms off the Californian coast and off the Atlantic coast of the United States. It was nice to know that the algae could multiply and aggregate on a scale visible from orbit, but such phenomena had been known for centuries, and there was nothing to indicate that these particular ones were producing ammonia. He’d have to look elsewhere for answers.
He decided to phone someone in Geography. He punched in the number he found in the university directory and asked the Departmental Secretary if he could speak to a member of staff involved in Ocean Sciences. After a pause the secretary said, “I’ll put you through to Dr. Craig Liddle.”
The number rang briefly.
“Liddle.”
“Hi, this is Terry McKinley, Physics. Sorry to bother you. Would you happen to know where I could find surveys of marine microorganisms?”
“What sort of surveys?”
“Well, analysis of samples taken by research vessels, mainly in the open Atlantic.”
“Not really my thing. I’m more interested in the interaction between the ocean and the weather. If you’re talking about the Atlantic, that’s a hell of a lot of ocean. I shouldn’t think there’s much systematic sampling away from coastal waters.”
“What about Institutes of Oceanography? Do they do that sort of thing?”
“What, like Scripps and Woods Hole? Yeah, they do but it would be targeted research. They’ll be studying a specific organism – maybe in the lab – or they’ll be looking at it in relation to commercial fisheries. Again it’s mostly coastal waters. If you’re thinking about open ocean, Bermuda may have some information about the waters off their shores.”
“Bermuda? I hadn’t thought of that. It’s kind of in the middle, isn’t it?”
“Nearer to the States than here, but it’s a major focus for marine life.”
“Right, I’ll follow it up. Thanks a lot.”
“No problem.”
Terry found the official Bermuda government web site and started to surf it. It was extensive but he couldn’t seem to find anything specific on water quality or cyanobacteria. He wondered what it would be under. Out of a combination of curiosity and desperation he clicked on “Transport”. That opened another menu and he began to work through the choices. When he selected “Bermuda Radio” he found, to his surprise, a site for Bermuda’s Maritime Operations Centre. This seemed more like it. There was a tab marked “marine incidents”, and he worked backwards, scanning the brief reports for each month. When he reached the previous April he stopped, blinked a couple of times, then reached for the phone.
Maggie sat down, still wearing her short coat. She was out of breath.
“I came as fast as I could,” she said. “What is it?”
He turned the screen towards her. “This is a list of marine incidents at Bermuda. Look at this one from last year.”
17th April: 11:35 a.m. Bermuda Harbour Radio advised by USCG RCC Norfolk that New York Air Traffic Control have received a report from commercial airliner of possible oil pollution approximately 90 NM north-east of Fort George. Bermuda Radio requests in/out bound aircraft to overfly the area and report further. At 12.55 inbound Delta flight confirms no oil pollution but a large patch of weed with vessel apparently stranded in it. Incoming merchant vessel “Wichita” asked to divert. “Wichita” finds missing 32-foot powerboat “Fair Wind” with five people on board, four dead and one in critical condition. Crew report foul choking smell in area. “Fair Wind” towed in, met by Police Marine Launch “Cormorant 3”. Sole survivor has breathing difficulties and dies before reaching port. “Fair Wind” taken to boatyard for detailed examination.
“Five dead, Maggie, and at least one of them had breathing difficulties before they died.”
“It only says ‘foul, choking smell’, Terry. It doesn’t mean – ”
“Wait, you haven’t seen all of it yet. While I was waiting for you I found a follow-up article in The Royal Gazette, Bermuda’s daily newspaper.”
He brought it up on the screen and waited while she read it.
MYSTERY TRAGEDY AT SEA CLAIMS FIVE LIVES
The Bermuda Police Service has confirmed that the vessel discovered stranded in a mat of floating weed some 90 nautical miles north east of Fort George was the missing powerboat “Fair Wind”. There were no survivors. The two crew members have been named as Joseph Hedley, the owner of the vessel, and Axel Thorsen. The names of the three holidaymakers with them, two men and a woman, have not yet been released, but they were understood to be from Florida. The cause of the tragedy remains a mystery. The crew were very experienced and the sea was calm. There was no damage to the craft and there was fuel in the tanks.
Brian Morrissey, captain of merchant vessel “Wichita”, says they were making good time into port when they were asked to divert. They launched a rescue boat when they were within range, got a line on the powerboat and pulled it clear. Michael Muldoon, one of the crew members on the rescue boat, said there were rods out on “Fair Wind” so maybe someone had a fish on and they didn’t see the weed in time to stop it fouling the screws. “Four of them were dead, and the fifth was in a bad way, struggling to breathe. That was no surprise – all of us were coughing, and we were only there a few minutes. The air was really irritating. There was a smell like something between decaying fish and stale urine. It was kind of quiet, too. As a rule we have a lot of se
a birds following the “Wichita” but they’d all gone – not one in sight. I can tell you, we were glad to put that place behind us; fair gave us the creeps.”
Dr. Alan Watkins, a marine expert, said that all the evidence pointed to the “Fair Wind” getting caught in a very large algal mat. “The most likely explanation is that a bubble of gas, from decaying vegetation trapped beneath the mat, broke to the surface and asphyxiated the crew as they were trying to break free. I understand that post mortems are being carried out, and we may know more about the cause of death after that.”
She straightened up, unbuttoning her collar.
“Sorry,” he said jumping up. “Let me take your coat.”
He hung the coat over his own, on the back of the door. When he turned she was looking around her. For him an office was an office, but now he saw it through her eyes. It was dingy compared to her light, modern room. Of the two windows, one was painted shut and the catch on the other jammed so frequently he tended to leave it open in summer and closed in winter. There were bookshelves on one wall and four filing cabinets lined up against the other. The remaining floor space was just big enough to accommodate his desk and a couple of chairs.
“So what do you think?” he asked, as he returned to his desk.
“Ammonia doesn’t smell like decaying fish.”
“No, but it is irritating and it does smell like stale piss. And any fish living amongst the weed would have died so that would account for the rest of the stink. Also the remark about sea birds. It was almost the first thing I noticed when I went down to that Welsh river: it was unnaturally quiet, and there was no bird life.”
“Let’s not get too excited, Terry,” she said gently. “Their expert could well be right. It could have been a pocket of methane or something from decaying vegetation.”
He grimaced. “I suppose so. It looked like a really good lead, that’s all.”
“What made you look at Bermuda?”
“I spoke to someone in the university. He said Bermuda is a major focus for marine life.”
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