Andrea nodded, realized Gabrielle couldn’t see it, and replied, “Yes, we met last time I came down to look things over.”
Gabrielle went on so quickly that Andrea realized the question about Jason had been rhetorical. “Jason hauled in a couple of the nets. They overflowed. Those fishermen had never seen a catch like that, and I thought they would dive over the side of their boats when Jason released the net and dropped his catch back into the water.
“It took me a while to convince the men that the fish weren’t going anywhere, and that more would come as we continued the process. I showed them the pumps, and I explained what the equipment did, but I don’t think much of it was absorbed. All they could talk about after we pulled back through the nets and headed for shore was the nets and the fish. I’m half-convinced they think it’s magic, and that Jason is some sort of sorcerer.”
“That’s wonderful, Gabrielle,” Andrea said. Her smile was deep and genuine. She liked Gabrielle, and had been happy to add the woman to their staff the previous year. So many great minds who could do so many wonderful things for the world were buried every year in bureaucracy, red tape, and poorly funded programs that it was one of the joys of her life that she could afford, now and then, to rescue one of them and put them to work. Despite her own agenda with the hurricanes and tropical cyclones, Andrea was proud to be part of the fish farming research. If it panned out, so to speak, it could actually make a significant impact on world hunger.
“Hey,” Gabrielle said suddenly, “the wind is picking up here. Looks like we’ve got some rain on the way, so I’d better hang up and get in to shore. I love this job, but I don’t want to be caught out here in one of your storms.”
“No fear of that just now,” Andrea replied with a short laugh. “We have a couple of small cells forming, but nothing close to you at the moment.”
“That’s good to know,” Gabrielle replied, her voice suddenly echoing as if from very far away. The connection was weakening. “I think I’ll head in all the same. It’s really choppy out here, and darker than it should be. Even a good thunderstorm can be dangerous if you get caught out on one of the farms.”
“Be safe,” Andrea replied. She clicked the button that closed the connection and tapped the antenna on her chin thoughtfully.
She rose and walked past her desk and her laptop to a larger monitor screen that hung from one wall. She grabbed a remote from the couch and flipped the on button. She clicked past the networks and cable channels and into the private network they’d set up for use within the building. She could take feeds straight off the computers if she got tired of the laptop’s small screen, or she could tap into the radars.
The screen lit up with colored patches and a map. The default map was small, scaled to show the United States coastline and on through the Midwest, as well as the entire Gulf Stream storm track. She saw that the two small storm cells she’d mentioned to Gabrielle were right about where she’d expected to see them. There was no other significant activity. Over Bermuda, where Gabrielle and her fish farms were anchored, the sky was mottled with brilliant green. Rain. There was plenty of rain there, and no doubt some winds that would seem pretty wild out riding on a small craft by the fish farm, but nothing to get excited about—at least not if you were hunting hurricanes.
Andrea felt something nibbling at the back of her mind, but she couldn’t get it to latch on. She shrugged, turned off the television, and sat at her desk, staring at the laptop. Almost without conscious thought, she brought up the simulation software. They had added a new module, and with the data that had been extracted from Keith’s report, it would be possible to bring it into the simulation for the first time.
She brought her storm on screen, Hurricane Andrea. At the beginning of the simulation it was still far up the gulf, significantly smaller, but moving quickly. Next, she loaded in the new module—the barges. She had the capability of using from one to twenty-five barges. Currently they didn’t have the funds to allocate any more, and if their calculations were correct, and they were able to prove their findings to the government, there would be no need for any further construction. Andrea felt the years bunched at her back, ready to spring.
Even if the government took the program over and brought back Operation Stormfury, she would not be the one to lead it. She had been doing this for too long, fighting the storms, watching them wash over Florida and North Carolina, Ivan—heading north, and then cutting back south and then north again, washing over Louisiana while southern Florida was slammed by storm after storm. It was time for her to get one in the win column, and then settle down.
She pulled up all twenty-five of the barges. The experiment had given them good, solid numbers on the temperature difference that the units could create, and how long it took to make such a difference. Keith’s people had input the data that morning, so it was all ready for her to manipulate and study. They also had good data on how long it took to get the units towed into place and operational.
These had been the only figures necessary to complete the simulation module that allowed her to test them against the real thing. With the software she could pit the barges against the biggest, baddest storm she’d ever seen, and she could change the variables and adjust that simulation until she had it exactly right. She might never see another storm like Andrea—prayed that she did not—but whatever storm she did come up against, she wanted to be sure that it came out the clear loser.
She attached the barges in fives to a series of large, ocean-going tugboats, two groups of five leaving from near the complex in North Carolina, one from Bermuda, where it was staged, and the other two groups of five barges from the Norfolk area—though two of these barges were still dry-docked, she used the full force for this initial test. Once she had them on course and moving into place, and their positions fixed in her mind, there was nothing left to do but to wait.
Andrea knew how warm the water had been off Bermuda that day so long ago. She knew how fast the wind had been blowing, and how far beyond the outer wall of the storm the weather problems spread. There were few details of the storm she couldn’t recite like a child’s poem. She had studied that storm for so long it had become a part of her.
It wouldn’t be easy to get the barges into position, but it was not impossible. The last thing she sent out was a pair of very fast cutters that trailed behind the main group. Once the units were in place, detached and anchored, these smaller, faster craft would pick up the crews from the barges and hightail it out of there, heading off at a right angle from the storm and shooting for clear, open water.
They would be cutting it close, but Andrea believed the two boats would have time to get everyone on board and get out before the worst of the storm could hit. They only needed to get far enough away that the boats would not be swamped. Her crews were experienced and fearless—she’d picked them partially for these qualities. Once they were away from the main wall of the storm, they would turn into whatever weather they were too slow to evade and ride it out.
In the case of the simulation before her, it wouldn’t matter. All of the boats would escape on the Bermuda side, and the storm itself, once it reached the slick of glittering peanut oil, would move to the left—to the southwest. Once they had convinced the experts that their data was supportable in a real world scenario, and the government was on board, and the units were deployed on a more permanent basis, running part of each month to create a temperature barrier against hurricanes, when they were in season, escape wouldn’t be a problem. The units could very likely be automated, and in any case, they would have a lot more lead-time. She was giving this test the worst-case scenario, as she saw it.
The barges moved slowly. She’d sped up the time scale considerably because she didn’t want to spend days sitting in front of her computer screen for each simulation, but it was still a lengthy process. The tugboats and barges ground their way slowly across the screen, turning well west and a little south of the storm and stretching out in a long line. Sh
e had set them to drop at fifteen-mile intervals. It might not be close enough, but she thought that it would. With the huge compressors in operation, five to a barge, the amount of cold water displaced from the depths would be staggering. There might not be a solid wall of cold in the hurricane’s path, but what there was would be intense and concentrated near each barge and would spread outward, mostly in the direction of the storm.
The barges were placed with the five-pump side facing the storm, and the three pumps on the opposite side spreading the wall of chilled water further along the storm’s path. If it managed to retain its strength past the beginnings of the “wall,” it would have to cross past the point where the far-side pumps effect ended.
As the tugs passed each point on the screen where she had placed a marker, a barge dropped free of one of the chains and a small timer appeared on its deck. This represented the expected amount of time it would take to anchor the barge and get the pumps running. This time, like the transit time, had been accelerated. Andrea knew that it would take, on average, about two hours for all the equipment to be in place and activated once it was on site. It might take considerably less, but that was the least amount of time she felt comfortable allotting the process. It would take a little longer for the cutters to tie up to each barge and take the five crewmembers off of each platform.
Her fingers shook, and she rose, turning toward the coffee. She wouldn’t do the program or the test any good by sitting and staring at it, no matter how hard she might wish she could. Trying to ignore the screen as it flickered and shifted behind her, Andrea rinsed out her coffee cup, dropped in two spoonfuls of sugar and a small packet of creamer.
She didn’t have to be sitting in front of the simulation to see it. She took her cup and moved to her favored spot and stared out over the complex from the huge front window. The heat from her coffee caused a momentary spot of fog on the thick glass. She knew that the cell had fully formed by this point. She could see the outer curls stutter flashing across the screen, as if the eye of a hurricane was like a human heart, pulsing and beating, pouring its strength into the wind and the rain and churning up the waves with unseen appendages below.
Andrea didn’t know who’d coined the term “eye” of the hurricane, but she thought that whoever it had been should have been able to watch the storm on her computer simulation before making the call. If they’d seen what she saw, day in and day out, they would have called it the heart of the hurricane, not the eye. The storm was blind in its fury. If it could see, it wasted no compassion or interest on what it found in its path.
She turned away from the window and returned to her seat. The barges were lined up in a semi-circle just to the left of and below the approaching storm. She initialized the oil slick and watched the glittering graphic representation spread across the waves. She could have programmed in aircraft and dropped the oil in balloons as they had done so long ago, but that would have led to the temptation to create authentic looking seed planes as well, and one of those planes would not make it home from the simulation. It was hard enough to relive her failure time and time again without adding the pain of cartoon versions of her husband dropping into the ocean and disappearing forever to the show.
It wasn’t important how the slick got onto the water, or how the silver iodide was introduced into the storm. The seeding had not been a factor, as far as they knew. The slick had been placed so far ahead of schedule, thanks to the malfunctioning timepieces, that most of what had happened—whatever that might have been—was over before the three planes she knew had delivered their seed packages were in position. She assumed that Phil had been in position as well, and further assumed that his silver iodide pellets had been dropped into the suddenly—and impossibly—larger storm.
Either way, she didn’t believe that it would make much of a difference. In fact, she’d run the simulation a number of times without including the silver iodide with little visible difference in the outcome. There just wasn’t enough useful data to attribute major changes to that portion of their operation. She wouldn’t have included the seeding at all, but she wanted everything to be portrayed as accurately as possible.
Below the storm, the small boats filled with the teams who would light off the barge equipment pulled away at an angle down past the lower edge of Cuba and out to sea. The devices themselves blinked from their original orange color to bright yellow, signifying they had come on line. The first of them had been live for some minutes—the last came to life shortly after the boats pulsed away.
Andrea glanced at the figures tabulated at the bottom of the screen. She knew what the water temperature had been when she began, a balmy seventy-eight degrees. She watched closely, and slowly—almost imperceptibly at first, and then as the computer performed its algorithmic calculations on the volume of displaced water and the amount of heat exchanged during the process, the number dipped. Seventy-seven—a long pause—then seventy-six and seventy-five in rapid progression.
The storm drew closer, nearly ready to collide with the slick and take its kamikaze lunge at the U.S. coastline, but before it could do so the barges kicked into high gear. The speed of the temperature drop increased, and in a moment it held steady at just under sixty-two degrees. The devices—if the calculations were correct, and she believed that they were close, if not perfect—could drop the temperature of the water sixteen degrees in a matter of only a few moments. She knew the temperature would continue to decrease slowly as more and more of the warmer upper layers were dispersed or replaced with the cold, deep water forced up by the compressed air pumps.
The storm crashed into the wall of the oil slick and spun hard. Wind speed increased dramatically, and with a familiar and gut-wrenching whipping motion, it shot down the length of the sparkling patch that depicted the oil and curled off away from Bermuda on a northwest course. It was heading straight into the path she had known it would take. This fore-knowledge was an advantage she would not have with a natural storm, but this was a simulation, and she needed to know what would happen if she got everything exactly right, not what might happen if a rogue storm canted off course and made a bee-line for the Cayman Islands.
The temperature had continued to drop, and was approaching fifty-eight degrees. A shift of nearly twenty degrees in such a short period of time was more significant than she had expected. Her mind worked at a similar speed to that of the computer, but she was able to slip off on odd vectors when her imagination dragged her. It was the heat exchange that had eluded her in her initial estimate. She had not accounted for how much more quickly the change could be spread once the water being displaced and the water displacing it had a chance to approach one another’s temperature.
It took less energy to drop the temperature of water at sixty degrees than it did to drop the temperature of water at seventy-eight degrees, and the same amount of energy was being expended. It hurried the process. The only thing in question now was—would it be enough? Would anything be enough?
She watched the graphic of small particles dropping over the storm wall flash. The silver iodide had been delivered. The storm gained in strength so quickly and to such an impossible level, that Andrea had the urge—as she always did—to press back away from the computer, as if it might explode from within and drive shards of plastic into her skin with its force. The winds soared to a sustained speed of over two hundred miles per hour, and the entire mass of the hurricane picked up speed, traveling across the water at around twenty-five miles per hour.
The temperature near the barges had dropped to fifty-five degrees and held. It was unlikely it would drop further before the storm reached that point, but it should be more than enough. Fifty-five degrees was well below the temperature the storm needed to maintain a tight “eye,” and without the eye even the most powerful of storms was just a bunch of rain clouds blowing over the water. It would falter, fizzle, and die out before it ever made landfall. That, at least, is what she hoped would happen.
On her screen, the storm
reached the outer edges of the temperature controlled water. She had developed the barge module so that it colored the water that had been affected in shades of light blue, the coldest point being almost white, centered around the devices themselves, while the cold that radiated out from that point was shaded in gradations of darker and dark blue until the point beyond the range of the barge’s influence, where the water was such a dark blue it was almost black.
The storm passed out of the dark water and into the first layer of lighter blue without hesitation. There was no noticeable slowing of wind speed, and no effect on the eye. With the high-speed rendering capability of the simulation controlling things, Andrea watched in fascination as the storm rolled up and over the cold front. The outer reaches of the storm swirled over the barges, and at that point all that was visible were the numbers at the bottom of her screen, and the eye itself.
She thought it was going to slide right over the barges, swallow them whole, and continue on its course, but it did not. As the eye neared the cold zone, she saw the outer wall thinning. A break in the wall of the eye itself appeared, and then another. The storm, rather than continuing forward, hesitated. She was reminded of a huge spider, stopping and drawing back on its haunches, seeking in every direction and looking for a target at which to strike.
The storm slid over and past the area where the barges were anchored. Though the eye was destabilized, it fought to reform. She watched, bit her tongue sharply and tasted blood. Her hands gripped the arms of her seat so tightly her knuckles went bloodless and pale from the strain. The storm slowed. The mass of clouds still moved toward the U.S. coastline, but not as rapidly as before.
It had dropped from twenty-five miles per hour down to about twelve, and showed signs of further slowing. The eye, which had been a tight, pulsing black whole in the center of it all, spread into a vaguely oval shape and grew ragged around its edges. Wind speed dropped quickly to a hundred and fifty miles per hour, and then fell away drastically. There were still huge, wild gusts of air, but the storm was disintegrating.
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