“Why can’t I be like other people?” she asked Elvis, turning momentarily from the screen to gaze down into his huge, brown eyes. “Why can’t I just count sheep?”
Chapter Fourteen
Andrea was up before dawn. Her apartment consisted of two rooms and an office converted to a kitchen on the top floor of the complex. She’d had a smaller place in Elizabeth City for a while, but the time spent commuting had seemed a waste of time to her, and as often as not she fell asleep at her desk, or in one of the padded leather chairs, staring out into the night sky.
The complex had grown by degrees. The hangars had been converted, one by one, until all but one of them had sprung up with steel reinforced walls and huge panes of triple-thick safety glass. If Andrea’s calculations were correct, the buildings could withstand wind in excess of two hundred miles per hour without sustaining even minor damage. They were prototypes, examples of the design techniques and structural improvements she’d patented over the years.
One hangar still stood, shadowed and empty, near the main building. It was the hangar that had housed Captain Phillip Wicks’ plane the day before he took off for his final flight. Andrea knew it was a horrible waste of resources, space, and money, but she had plenty, and she couldn’t bear to touch it.
Phil had never been found. No wreckage had been found. There was no evidence that he crashed at sea in the storm, no more than there was that the storm had ever existed. She couldn’t let go of the notion that one day he would fly over, call over the radio for clearance to land, and taxi into that old dilapidated building with a smile and a wave.
Keith Scharf was still with her, and he’d prodded her gently to do something about the hangar, but he didn’t push too hard. She thought he was secretly afraid that if the hangar fell, she wouldn’t be far behind it, and possibly that was right. There was damned little holding her together as it was. In her zeal to battle hurricanes, she’d lost sight of anything resembling a real life.
After walking Elvis and brewing strong, fresh coffee, Andrea opened the doors to her office wide and set about straightening things up. She hadn’t gotten any better about filing over the years, though she had more assistance with it now, and less paper to deal with. Everything was electronic, CDs, DVDs, optical drives. Sometimes she grew nostalgic for the black screen monitors with their bright, glowing green letters and the huge, fan-fold reams of computer readouts that had all but buried her in the early days. Not often, though. It was nice to have all of the information at hand, and it was nice to have the computer do most of the work that had previously fallen to error-prone men and women.
Not long after eight o’clock, a string of large trucks wound their way down the long entrance road. Andrea stopped to watch as they showed their identification at the gate and were waved through. She’d known they would arrive early, returning from the latest experimental excursion. She also knew most of the results that they would bring with them, but she intended to wait and let Keith present them himself.
He had the right to be proud—he’d come a long way from the young researcher with stars in his eyes and peanut oil as his chosen weapon. After Phil’s disappearance, Keith had been her strongest support. She loved her work, but a spark had been missing since she’d lost Phil. Keith Scharf had helped her to rebuild her confidence and her sense of purpose, if not to regain that spark.
She knew that, in his own, distracted way, Keith had fallen in love with her. She appreciated his love, but she couldn’t return it, and after many years of quiet patience, Keith accepted that as well. He had been married only three years earlier, at the tender age of fifty-three, to one of their senior analysts, a lovely woman named Grace Purvis, and the two of them seemed very happy. Andrea had attended their wedding, and she felt genuine warmth for the two that must have been similar to the sensation of motherhood.
The first of the trucks rolled into onto the grounds. There were loading docks in the rear of two of the larger buildings. The first story of each was a huge work bay, and she knew this was where the trucks were headed. Before rounding the corner, the lead truck stopped and Keith climbed down. His arms were full of folders. He waved and shouted something at the driver, and then turned toward the main complex.
Andrea set out two cups and poured the coffee into a carafe to keep it warm and fresh. She thought briefly of the old stainless steel urn they’d used when they first purchased the building, and she smiled. The Bunn-O-Matic drip coffee maker she now used was hooked directly into the water supply. You put the grounds in place—fresh from the companion coffee grinder—and pushed a button. Not everything about the good old days was good.
It took Keith a few minutes to make his way up the elevator and onto her floor, so Andrea returned to the window and watched the gates being locked behind the last of the trucks. As the vehicle turned around the side of the largest building, she saw that water dripped and sloshed out the back, running over the tires and splashing on the pavement.
Her buzzer rang, and she went to the door, pulling it wide with a smile. “Good morning, Keith,” she said. “Good trip?”
Keith Scharf had aged well. He was still stout, and his dark hair still stuck out at an unruly angle, slightly gray above the ears, but full. He wore overalls and black work boots, and he looked every bit the foreman coming in off the loading bay to report.
“Very good,” he replied, sweeping her into a hug.
Elvis hopped up then, nosing jealously between the two, and Keith laughed. “No worries, Elvis, you’re still the king,” he said, reaching down to pat the bulldog’s glossy head.
“These are only the preliminary reports,” he said, tossing the folders onto her table and smiling, “but I’m sure you already know that. It looks very positive.”
“And with only three of the pumps,” she replied. “Impressive. Better than we hoped, I think.”
Keith nodded. “We were able to cut these three loose before they shipped out to the fish farm. I wanted to have new, fresh equipment when we tried this. It was still a little risky, but only to the machinery.”
They both fell silent for a moment as the implication of what he’d said dropped over them. They knew full well why they would not risk personnel on these experiments, and there was no reason to speak the words out loud, but Andrea couldn’t help glancing out the window at the empty hangar below.
The pumps he referred to were the newest in a long line of devices their company had researched and bought into. They served a dual purpose, which was a boon to the company financially, but everyone knew which of the two purposes their efforts were meant to support.
The first and least important, as far as Andrea was concerned, was the creation of highly oxygenated, mineral-rich, intensive biological zones, or fish-farm regions. There was a name for the effect when it occurred naturally, a St. Georges’ Banks effect. These pumps could recreate the effect in regions of the ocean that were considered hopeless for food production—oceanic wastelands, or deserts. For purposes of re-mineralization, the air would need to be pumped down to near the bottom before release, allowing aeration and the breaking loose of minerals from the ocean floor.
Relatively small fish-farms could be maintained privately by containing them within a set of nets with buoys and anchors, or within “bubble curtains” using the same effects as were used to screen Pacific harbors from submarine sonar during World War II. Larger-size fish farms could be “open,” without containing nets, maintained by nations or private consortia or mixed public-and-private consortia for all to share in. It was a very noble project, and as far as it went, Andrea was happy to be part of the research.
For unknown reasons, government and scientific communities had largely ignored the apparatus. Keith had found it while cruising the Internet one evening in search of new theories on hurricanes. The likelihood had grown smaller over the years that they would run across someone with an idea they hadn’t already explored, but Keith considered every avenue worth pursuing, and when his random sea
rch brought him to a page explaining the fish-farming device, and how it operated, he found that the inventor of the device had another possible use for it—stopping Hurricanes.
Hurricanes require a path of warmer water to maintain a tight, well-formed eye and continue along their path. They are drawn up the Gulf Stream by the warmth of the water. The inventor of the fish farming pumps suggested that if enough of his devices, or large enough versions of his device, were placed in the path of seasonal storms, then run only a few days at a time, so that they didn’t make a large disturbance in the eco-system, they might prevent the forming of the storms that ravaged the U.S. coastline before they even became an issue.
The pumps wouldn’t have to operate in the same fashion as the fish-farming pumps. To reach water cool enough to change the surface temperature, the compressed air would only have to be forced down a few fathoms. The cold water would be displaced and rise to the top. These pumps, of course, required good, solid power sources, and would have to be large, or very widespread, but the theory behind the proposed system was sound, and it was enough to get both Keith and Andrea excited.
It wasn’t really a process designed to stop a storm, but it was possible that it could. A large enough concentration of pumps could shift the water temperature over a large surface area of water dramatically in a very short amount of time, and if they were placed in the path of a hurricane, or tropical cyclone, they might cause enough of a shift in temperature to slow or stop the storm. Certainly they would be disruptive, and sometimes that was all that was necessary. An unexpected front, or a shift in barometric pressure, could shatter the continuity of a storm. Hurricanes, for all their power, were fragile things, and once the eye had been disrupted, they often fizzled out or died into thunderstorms and rainsqualls.
Of course, it would take more than a few of the pumps to bring about a noticeable affect on a very large storm. The smaller units designed for fish farming wouldn’t do. You’d need hundreds of them, and it wasn’t feasible to place them across the entire storm wall of a hurricane. The cost would be high, and the pumps would certainly be lost, along with whatever anchored them in place. The initial estimate, in fact, was one pump in place for every one-third of a mile of ocean space to cover the storm wall of a hurricane.
Then the real work began. First Keith and Andrea had scaled the pumps exactly as they appeared on the net, and they’d funded a couple of small, experimental fish farms. The initial results were unimpressive, but with some fine-tuning, and after bringing in a few experts, they were able to create a stable, healthy environment in a previously unproductive expanse of the ocean. Keith immediately funded a dozen more small operations and started the wheels turning to apply for government grants to sustain them. The food they produced was donated charitably, and they quickly caught the attention of several large companies.
Meanwhile, Andrea and Keith took the design in an entirely different direction. The pumps used for the fish farms were too small for their purpose. They weren’t much bigger than those used to run a simple jackhammer, and while they worked fine for what they’d been designed to do, they wouldn’t be powerful enough to displace enough supercooled water in a short enough time to effect changes in a storm. They needed something more powerful, and what they latched onto was what Keith called “The Barge.”
“The Barge” was, basically, just what it sounded like. They started with long, flat ocean barges, modified so that each had five very large compressed air pumps attached along the waterline one side, and three more on the opposite side. They designed the barges to be towed into place and anchored at either end. The barges themselves hadn’t cost much—there were plenty of craft of that sort in mothballs, available through the defense re-utilization system, and since they were funded for research on larger fish farms, it hadn’t been that difficult to arrange for purchase.
The pumps had been more difficult, but Andrea was a wealthy woman. Between her own funds and those of the corporation, the cost of the equipment had been absorbed.
Now the fruits of their labor sat on the table before her. A small tropical depression had formed a week earlier, and they had gone quietly into action. Keith oversaw the placement of three of their barges in the path of what was quickly forming into a tight tropical storm. When the storm reached the supercooled water displaced by the pumps, the storm broke up. There had been minor damage to two of the three barges, but they had stopped the storm in its tracks, and they had lost no equipment. It was the first concrete success in all the years they’d been together. It was a huge step forward in storm research, and if they could add just a little more to the file, Andrea was poised to approach the government with the culmination of her life’s work.
She wanted to bring Operation Stormfury back on line, not as a group considered to be staffed by idealistic crackpots fighting impossible odds, but with real direction and proven solutions. Her research had moved ahead by leaps and bounds. She had improved the structures of buildings in the paths of storms, decreased the revenue lost by insurance companies and government grants for the rebuilding of ruined cities, improved the accuracy and range of Doppler radar systems, and provided her simulation program for the prediction of the habits of hurricanes. Now she wanted to provide the basis for a network of the compressed air pumps that could be run at infrequent intervals to prevent the danger of hurricanes to the United States altogether. There was a lot of research involved. There were ecological concerns, but she believed that, at the very least, the threat of huge hurricanes could be limited and possibly eliminated.
Altogether they managed to outfit twenty-five of the barges. They had the ability to drag five of them at a time via ocean-going tug boats. Five of the barges were anchored off the coast of Bermuda, another five off the Cayman Islands, and two were still being fitted in the shipyards in Norfolk, Virginia. The rest were docked along the North Carolina coast. They had kept the purpose of the craft to themselves, giving vague answers involving fish farms and keeping the core group of scientists, engineers, and technicians under tight rein.
Andrea felt the years weigh heavily on her shoulders. She didn’t have that long to find the key to her dreams, and she felt the ghosts of her father and Phil hovering in the air just out of reach, watching her and waiting for redemption. If she failed, her father would not be avenged, and Phil would have died in vain. She knew both of these assertions were wrong, but she couldn’t shake them, and had long since given up trying.
“I think we have it this time, Andrea,” Keith said, drinking the last of his coffee. “I really think we have it.”
She turned back from the window and smiled at him, nodding. “I think so too,” she replied. “All we need now is a larger storm, and a chance to get the equipment into place. I want to put everyone on alert as of now.”
Keith frowned just for a moment. He’d just returned, and Andrea could see that the idea of heading back out immediately didn’t much appeal to him.
“We have to, Keith,” she said. “The season is almost over. If we hold off much longer, we won’t be able to do anything until next year.”
Keith’s features softened, and he rose, stepped closer and took her hands in his. “I know,” he said. “I’ll pass the word along, and I’ll get messages out to the islands to keep all the barges and boats on standby. We can get moving pretty quickly once we have a reason.”
Andrea gripped his hands, then turned back to the window. “Call me tonight, when they’re ready,” she said. “I’ll sleep better.”
Keith watched her for a moment, and then turned toward the door. “Will do,” he said as he stepped into the hall. “And don’t worry,” he added. “There will still be something this year. We have almost a month.”
Andrea didn’t answer, and after a few moments Keith’s footsteps faded as he reached the end of the hall and stepped into the elevator.
Elvis lifted his head, waited until the elevator door slid closed, then looked at Andrea with his head cocked. He whined softly, but
when he got no response, he laid his head back on his paws and stared up at her.
At the window, Andrea stared down at the empty hangar. Tears streamed unheeded down her cheeks, but the corners of her lips were turned up in a grim smile.
Chapter Fifteen
Andrea sat by the big window that evening and stared down at the complex, her phone cradled against her shoulder and her feet up on the concrete window ledge. She smiled, and with her free hand she twirled the ends of her hair almost girlishly. It had been a very good day, and she was enjoying the conversation.
On the other end of the line, Gabrielle Martinez was discoursing on the miracle of the contained fish farm. Gabrielle was as enthused by her work as Andrea was consumed by her own; the other woman’s stories of pumps and compressors, nets and buoys, and the inherent problems of coordinating all of these elements with mostly natives to assist her had lightened Andrea’s mood considerably.
“Really, Andrea,” Gabrielle said, “it is working out very well. We have three farms here now, spaced along the outer range of coral reefs that were dead or dying, and they are producing. You should see the looks on the faces of some of the older fishermen, men who spent long patient hours watching as we got everything into place, and longer hours still explaining to me that there were no fish to be caught where we were setting up, and that they would guide me to where the fish could still be found, if I would pay them.
“Just the other day I invited two of them out. They were so solemn. One of them brought me in his boat, as if our own craft weren’t safe, or we didn’t have the skill to get to our own installation. I let them into the area with the nets, and Jason—you remember Jason?”
Mote in Andrea's Eye Page 14