“Another precision display of the sea’s temper,” sputtered Giordino, his arms locked in a death grip around the console. “What did we do to make her so mad?”
Pitt immediately released Maeve and lifted her to a sitting position. “Are you all right?”
She coughed for several seconds before gasping, “I expect ... I’ll live. What in God’s name hit us?”
“I suspect a seismic disturbance on the sea bottom. It doesn’t take a quake of great magnitude to set off a series of rogue waves.”
Maeve wiped the wet strands of blond hair out of her eyes. “Thankfully, the boat didn’t capsize and none of us was thrown out.”
“How’s the rudder?” Pitt asked Giordino.
“Still hanging. Our paddle-mast survived in good shape, but our sail has a few rips and tears.”
“Our food and water supply also came through in good shape,” volunteered Maeve.
“Then we came through nearly unscathed,” said Giordino, as though he didn’t quite believe it.
“Not for long, I fear,” Pitt said tautly.
Maeve stared around the seemingly uninjured boat. “I don’t see any obvious damage that can’t be repaired.”
“Nor I,” Giordino agreed after examining the integrity of the buoyancy tubes.
“You didn’t look down.”
In the bright moonlight they could see the grim tension that was reflected on Pitt’s face. They stared in the direction he gestured and suddenly realized that any hope of survival had rapidly vanished.
There, running the entire length of the bottom hull, was a crack in the fiberglass that was already beginning to seep water.
Rudi Gunn was not into sweat and the thrill of victory. He relied on his mental faculties, a regimen of disciplined eating habits and his metabolism to keep him looking young and trim. Once or twice a week, as today, when the mood struck him, he rode a bicycle during his lunch hour, along side Sandecker, who was a jogging nut. The admiral’s daily run took him ten kilometers over one of several paths that ran through Potomac Park. The exercise was by no means conducted in silence. As one man ran and the other rode, the affairs of NUMA were discussed as if they were conversing in an office.
“What is the record for someone adrift at sea?” asked Sandecker as he adjusted a sweatband around his head.
“Steve Callahan, a yachtsman, survived 76 days after his sloop sank off the Canary Islands,” answered Gunn, “the longest for one man in an inflatable raft. The Guinness World Record holder for survival at sea is held by Poon Lim, a Chinese steward who was set adrift on a raft after his ship was torpedoed in the South Atlantic during World War Two. He survived 133 days before being picked up by Brazilian fishermen.”
“Was either adrift during a force ten blow?”
Gunn shook his head. “Neither Callahan nor Poon Lim was hit with a storm near the intensity of the typhoon that swept over Dirk, Al and Miss Fletcher.”
“Going on two weeks since Dorsett abandoned them,” said Sandecker between breaths. “If they outlasted the storm, they must be suffering badly from thirst and exposure to the elements.”
“Pitt is a man of infinite resourcefulness,” said Gunn indisputably. “Together with Giordino, I wouldn’t be surprised if they washed up on a beach in Tahiti and are relaxing in a grass shack.”
Sandecker stepped to the side of the path to allow a woman pushing a small child in a three-wheeled carrier to jog past in the other direction. After he resumed running, he murmured, “Dirk always used to say, the sea does not give up its secrets easily.”
“Things might have been resolved if Australian and New Zealand search-and-rescue forces could have joined NUMA’s efforts.”
“Arthur Dorsett has a long reach,” Sandecker said, irate. “I received so many excuses as to why they were busy on other rescue missions I could have papered a wall with them.”
“There’s no denying the man wields incredible power.” Gunn stopped pedaling and paused beside the admiral. “Dorsett’s bribe money reaches deep into the pockets of friends in the United States Congress and the parliaments of Europe and Japan. Astounding, the famous people who work for him.”
Sandecker’s face turned crimson, not from exertion but from hopelessness. He could not restrain his anger and resentment. He came to a stop, leaned down and gripped his knees, staring at the ground. “I’d close down NUMA in a minute for the chance to get my hands around Arthur Dorsett’s neck.”
“I’m sure you’re not alone,” said Gunn. “There must be thousands who dislike, distrust and even hate him. And yet they never betray him.”
“Small wonder. If he doesn’t arrange fatal accidents for those who stand in his way, he buys them off by filling their Swiss bank safety deposit boxes with diamonds.”
“A powerful persuader, diamonds.”
“He’ll never influence the President with them.”
“No, but the President can be misled by bad advice.”
“Surely not when the lives of over a million people are at stake.”
“No word yet?” asked Gunn. “The President said he’d be back to you in four days. It’s been six.”
“The urgency of the situation wasn’t lost on him—”
Both men turned at the honk of a horn from a car with NUMA markings. The driver pulled to a stop in the street opposite the jogging path. He leaned out the passenger’s window and shouted. “I have a call from the White House for you, Admiral.”
Sandecker turned to Gunn and smiled thinly. “The President must have big ears.”
As the admiral stepped over to the car, the driver handed him a portable phone. “Wilbur Hutton on a safe line, sir.”
“Will?”
“Hello, Jim, I’m afraid I have discouraging news for you.”
Sandecker tensed. “Please explain.”
“After due consideration, the President has postponed any action regarding your acoustic plague.”
“But why?” Sandecker gasped. “Doesn’t he realize the consequences of no action at all?”
“Experts on the National Science Board did not go along with your theory. They were swayed by the autopsy reports from Australian pathologists at their Center for Disease Control in Melbourne. The Hussies conclusively proved that the deaths on board the cruise ship were caused by a rare form of bacterium similar to the one causing Legionnaires’ disease.”
“That’s impossible!” Sandecker snapped.
“I only know what I was told,” Hutton admitted. “The Hussies suspect that contaminated water in the ship’s heating system humidifiers was responsible.”
“I don’t care what the pathologists say. It would be folly for the President to ignore my warning. For God’s sake, Will, beg, plead or do whatever it takes to convince the President to use his powers to shut down Dorsett’s mining operations before it’s too late.”
“Sorry, Jim. The President’s hands are tied. None of his scientific advisers thought your evidence was strong enough to run the risk of an international incident. Certainly not in an election year.”
“This is insane!” Sandecker said desperately. “If my people are right, the President won’t be able to get elected to clean public bathrooms.”
“That’s your opinion,” said Hutton coldly. “I might add that Arthur Dorsett has offered to open his mining operations to an international team of investigators.”
“How soon can a team be assembled?”
“These things take time. Two, maybe three weeks.”
“By then you’ll have dead bodies stacked all over Oahu.”
“Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, you’re in a minority in that belief.”
Sandecker muttered darkly, “I know you did your best, Will, and I’m grateful.”
“Please contact me if you come upon any further information, Jim. My line is always open to you.”
“Thank you.”
“Good-bye.”
Sandecker handed the phone back to the d
river and turned to Gunn. “We’ve been sandbagged.”
Gunn looked shocked. “The President is ignoring the situation?”
Sandecker nodded in defeat. “Dorsett bought off the pathologists. They turned in a phony report claiming the cause of death of the cruise ship passengers was contamination from the heating system.”
“We can’t give up,” Gunn said, furious at the setback. “We must find another means of stopping Dorsett’s madness in time.”
“When in doubt,” Sandecker said, the fire returning to his eyes, “bank on somebody who is smarter than you are.” He retrieved the phone and punched in a number. “There is one man who might have the key.”
Admiral Sandecker bent down and teed up at tire Camelback Golf Club in Paradise Valley, Arizona. It was two o’clock in the afternoon under a cloudless sky, only five hours after he had jogged with Rudi Gunn in Washington. After landing at the Scottsdale airport, he borrowed a car from a friend, an old retired Navy man, and drove directly to the golf course. January in the desert could be cool, so he wore slacks and a long-sleeve cashmere sweater. There were two courses, and he was playing on the one called Indian Bend.
He sighted on the green 365 meters away, took two practice swings, addressed his ball and swung effortlessly. The ball soared nicely, sliced a bit to the right, bounced and rolled to a stop 190 meters down the fairway.
“Nice drive, Admiral,” said Dr. Sanford Adgate Ames. “I made a mistake talking you into a friendly game of golf. I didn’t suspect old sailors took a ground sport seriously.” Behind a long, scraggly gray beard that covered his mouth and came down to his chest, Ames looked like an old desert prospector. His eyes were hidden behind blue-tinted bifocals.
“Old sailors do many strange things,” Sandecker retorted.
Asking Dr. Sanford Adgate Ames to come to Washington for a high-level conference was no different from praying to God to conjure up a sirocco wind to melt the polar ice cap. Neither was likely to respond. Ames hated New York and Washington with equal passion and absolutely refused to visit either place. Offers of testimonial dinners and awards wouldn’t budge him from his hideaway on Camelback Mountain in Arizona.
Sandecker needed Ames, needed him urgently. Biting the bullet, he requested a meeting with the soundmeister, as Ames was called among his fellow scientists. Ames agreed, but with the strict provision Sandecker bring his golf clubs, as all discussion would take place on the links.
Highly respected in the scientific community, Ames was to sound what Einstein was to time and light. Blunt, egocentric, brilliant, Ames had written more than three hundred papers on almost every known aspect of acoustical oceanography. His studies and analyses over the course of forty-five years covered phenomena ranging from underwater radar and sonar techniques to acoustic propagation to subsurface reverberation. Once a trusted adviser with the Defense Department, he was forced to resign after his fervent objections to ocean noise tests being conducted around the world to measure global warming. His caustic attacks on the Navy’s underwater nuclear test projects was also a source of animosity at the Pentagon. Representatives of a host of universities trooped to his doorstep in hopes of getting him to join their faculties, but he refused, preferring to do research with a small staff of four students he paid out of his own pocket.
“What do you say to a dollar a hole, Admiral? Or are you a true betting man?”
“You’re on, Doc,” said Sandecker agreeably.
Ames stepped up to the tee, studied the fairway as if aiming a rifle and swung. He was a man in his late sixties, but Sandecker noted that his backswing reach was only a few centimeters off that of a man much younger and more nimble. The ball soared and dropped into a sand trap just past the 200-meter marker.
“How quickly the mighty fall,” said Ames philosophically.
Sandecker was not conned easily. He knew he was being stroked. Ames had been notorious in Washington circles as a golf hustler. It was agreed by those on his sting list that if he hadn’t gone into physics he’d have entered the PGA tour as a professional.
They stepped into a golf cart and started off after their balls with Ames at the wheel. “How can I help you, Admiral?” he asked.
“Are you aware of NUMA’s efforts to track down and stop what we call an acoustic plague?” responded Sandecker.
“I’ve heard rumors.”
“What do you think?”
“Pretty farfetched.”
“The President’s National Science Board agrees,” Sandecker growled.
“I can’t say I really blame them.”
“You don’t believe sound can travel thousands of kilometers underwater, then surface and kill?”
“Output from four different high-intensity acoustical sources converging in the same area and causing death to every mammal within hearing distance? Not a hypothesis I’d recommend advancing, not if I wished to retain my standing among my peers.”
“Hypothesis be damned!” Sandecker burst out. “The dead already total over four hundred. Colonel Leigh Hunt, one of our nation’s finest pathologists, has proven conclusively that the cause of death is intense sound waves.”
“That’s not what I heard from the postmortem reports out of Australia.”
“You’re an old fake, Doc,” said Sandecker, smiling. “You’ve been following the situation.”
“Any time the subject of acoustics is mentioned, I’m interested.”
They reached Sandecker’s ball first. He selected a number three wood and knocked his ball into a sand trap twenty meters in front of the green.
“You too seem to have an affinity for sand traps,” said Ames offhandedly.
“In more ways than one,” Sandecker admitted.
They stopped at Ames’ ball. The physicist pulled a three iron from his golf bag. His game appeared more mental than physical. He took no practice swings nor went through any wiggling motions. He simply stepped up to the ball and swung. There was a shower of sand as the ball lofted and dropped on the green within ten meters of the cup.
Sandecker needed two strokes with his sand wedge to get out of the trap, then two putts before his ball rolled into the cup for a double bogey. Ames putted out in two for a par. As they drove to the second tee, Sandecker began to outline his findings in a detailed narrative. The next eight holes were played under heavy discussion as Ames questioned Sandecker relentlessly and brought up any number of arguments against acoustic murder.
At the ninth green, Ames used his pitching wedge to lay his ball within a club’s length of the hole. He watched with amusement as Sandecker misread the green and curled his putt back into the surrounding grass.
“You might be a pretty fair golfer if you got out and played more often, Admiral.”
“Five times a year is enough for me,” Sandecker replied. “I don’t feel I’m accomplishing anything by chasing a little ball for six hours.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve developed some of my most creative concepts while relaxing on a golf course.”
After Sandecker finally laid a putt in the hole, they returned to the cart. Ames pulled a can of Diet Coke from a small ice chest and handed it to the admiral. “What exactly do you expect me to tell you?” he asked.
Sandecker stared at him. “I don’t give a damn what ivory tower scientists think. People are dying out there on the sea. If I don’t stop Dorsett, more people are going to die, in numbers I don’t care to think about. You’re the best acoustics man in the country. I’m hoping you can steer me on a course to end the slaughter.”
“So I am your final court of appeals.” The subtle change in Ames’ friendly tone was to one that could hardly be called dead sober, but it was unmistakable. “You want me to come up with a practical solution to your problem.”
“Our problem,” Sandecker gently corrected him.
“Yes,” Ames said heavily, “I can see that now.” He held a can of Diet Coke in front of his eyes and stared at it curiously. “Your description of me is quite correct, Admiral. I am
an old fake. I worked out a blueprint of sorts before you left the ground in Washington. It’s far from perfect, mind you. The chance of success is less than fifty-fifty, but it’s the best I can devise without months spent in serious research.”
Sandecker looked at Ames, masking his excitement, his eyes alight with a hope that wasn’t there before. “You’ve actually conceived a plan for terminating Dorsett’s mining operations?” he asked expectantly.
Ames shook his head. “Any kind of armed force is out of my territory. I’m talking about a method for neutralizing the acoustic convergence.”
“How is that possible?”
“Simply put, sound-wave energy can be reflected.”
“Yes, that goes without saying,” said Sandecker.
“Since you know the four separate sound rays will propagate toward the island of Oahu and you have determined the approximate time of convergence, I assume your scientists can also accurately predict the exact position of the convergence.”
“We have a good fix, yes.”
“There’s your answer.”
“That’s it?” Any stirrings of hope that Sandecker had entertained vanished. “I must have missed something.”
Ames shrugged. “Occam’s razor, Admiral. Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.”
“The simplest answer is preferred over the complex.”
“There you have it. My advice, for what it’s worth, is for NUMA to build a reflector similar to a satellite dish, lower it into the sea at the point of convergence and beam the acoustic waves away from Honolulu.”
Sandecker kept his face from showing any emotion, but his heart pounded against his ribs. The key to the enigma was ridiculously uncomplicated. True, the execution of a redirection project would not be easy, but it was feasible.
“If NUMA can build and deploy a reflector dish in time,” he asked Ames, “where should the acoustic waves be redirected?”
A wily smile crossed Ames’ face. “The obvious choice would be to some uninhabited part of the ocean, say south to Antarctica. But since the convergence energy slowly diminishes the farther it travels, why not send it back to the source?”
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