Polar Shift (18 page)

“You don't have any other charters scheduled?”

“It's not that easy. It takes days, sometimes weeks, to put together a deal.”

“Then the plane and boat are free for charter?”

“Yeah, they're free. You know anyone interested in chartering them?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.” Schroeder reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a thick packet of bills, which he tossed onto a pile of papers. “This is for the trip out and the boat. I'll pay you an equal amount for the return flight. My only condition is that you stand by for a few days until I'm ready to leave.”

Harper picked the packet up and riffled the edges. They were all hundred-dollar bills. “I can practically buy a new plane for this.” He frowned. “This isn't something illegal, is it?”

“Nothing illegal at all. You'll be carrying no cargo. Only me.”

“You got papers?”

“Passport and visa are all up-to-date and in order.” They
should
be, for the money he paid for them, Schroeder thought. He had stopped in Seattle and waited impatiently while his favorite ID forger had cooked up a set of papers for Professor Kurtz.

Harper extended his hand. “You've got yourself a deal.”

“Good. When can we leave?”

“Any time you're ready.”

“I'm ready.”

The plane took off an hour later. Schroeder sat back in his seat, enjoying the solitude that came from being the only passenger on the plane, and sipped on a glass of Scotch that Harper had thoughtfully provided. Harper was at the controls. As Fairbanks faded in the distance and the plane struck off toward the west, he took a deep breath. He was aware that he was an old man trying to do a young man's job. Schroeder had asked not to be bothered for a while. He was tired and needed some sleep.

He would need deadly clarity for the task ahead. He cleared his mind of all emotion and closed his eyes.

T
HE
NOAA
SHIP
Benjamin Franklin
limped along like a sailor who'd been in a bar brawl. The tug-of-war with the whirlpool had taken its toll on the ship's engines, which had to be babied so they wouldn't break down completely. The
Throckmorton
trailed several hundred yards behind in case the NOAA vessel ran into trouble.

As the two ships slowly made their way toward Norfolk, a turquoise-colored utility helicopter with the letters
NUMA
visible on the fuselage appeared in the western sky. It hovered over the
Benjamin Franklin
like a hummingbird before touching down on the deck. Four people scrambled out, carrying medical supplies and equipment.

Crewmen directed the medical team to the ship's sick bay. None of the injuries sustained when the ship nearly went vertical in the whirlpool were life-threatening. The captain had requested the team to help the ship's paramedic, who had been overwhelmed with the sheer volume of bruises and concussions.

The helicopter was refueled, and two crewmen who had suffered broken arms were loaded aboard. Austin thanked the captain for his hospitality. Then he, along with the Trouts, Zavala and Professor Adler, climbed into the helicopter. Minutes later, they were airborne.

The helicopter touched down at National Airport less than two hours later. The injured were unloaded into waiting ambulances. The Trouts caught a taxi to their Georgetown town house, taking Adler with them as their guest, and Zavala drove Austin to his house on the Potomac River in Fairfax, Virginia, less than a mile from the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley. They all agreed to meet at eight the next morning after a good night's rest.

Austin lived in a converted Victorian boathouse overlooking the river. He had acquired the turreted building when he worked for the CIA. The mansard-roofed structure was part of an old estate, and the previous owners had let it run down. It had become a waterfront condominium for countless families of mice by the time Austin gutted and redid the interior and restored the exterior to its former glory. The space under the living quarters housed his racing scull and small, outboard hydroplane.

He dropped his bag in the hall and walked into a spacious living room. His house was an eclectic combination of the old and the new. The authentic, dark wooden, colonial furniture contrasted with the whitewashed walls hung with contemporary originals and painterly primitives and charts. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases held the leather-bound sea adventures of Conrad and Melville and the well-worn volumes of the great philosophers he liked to study. Glass cases displayed some of the rare dueling pistols he collected. His extensive collection of music, with a preference for progressive jazz, mirrored his steely coolness, his energy and drive, and his talent for improvisation.

He checked his phone for messages. There was a pile of calls, but nothing that couldn't wait. He flicked the stereo on, and Oscar Peterson's frenetic piano fingering filled the room. He poured a drink for himself of his best
aniejo
tequila, opened the sliding glass door and went out onto the deck with the ice tinkling pleasantly in his glass. He listened to the soft, rippling sounds, and breathed into his lungs the misty, flower-scented river air that was so different from the briny scent of the ocean where he spent much of his working days.

After a few minutes, he went back into the house, pulled a book on ancient Greek philosophers from a shelf and opened it to Plato's “Allegory of the Cave.” In Plato's parable, prisoners chained in a cave can see only the shadows cast by puppets on the wall and can hear the puppeteers moving behind their backs. On that slim evidence, the prisoners must decide what is shadow and what is reality. Similarly, Austin's brain was sorting the strange events of the last few days, trying to impose order on his mental chaos. He kept coming back to the one thing he could grasp. The mysterious ship.

He went over to a rolltop desk and powered up his laptop computer. Using the Web site information from Dr. Adler, he called up the satellite picture of the giant wave area. The image showed that all was quiet. He backed up through the image archives to the date of the
Southern Belle
's sinking. The two giant waves that had startled Adler were clearly displayed on the date the ship had disappeared. The ship itself was shown as a small blip that was there one minute, gone the next.

He zoomed the picture out so that it showed a greater area of ocean and saw something he hadn't noticed before. Four ships were clustered around the area of the sinking. There was one at each point of the compass, equidistant from one another. He stared at the image for a moment, then backed up a few days. The ships were not there. He jumped ahead to shortly after the sinking. There were only
three
ships. When he went to a day after the
Belle
went down, no blips were visible.

He was like one of Plato's prisoners in the cave, trying to separate reality from appearance, but he had one advantage they didn't. He could call out for help. He picked up the thick NUMA directory next to the phone, scanned the listings and punched in a number on the phone. A man answered.

“Hello, Alan. This is Kurt Austin. I just got in from a cruise. Hope I didn't wake you.”

“Not at all, Kurt. Nice to hear from you. What can I do for you?”

“Can you make a meeting at my place tomorrow morning around eight? It's quite important.”

“Of
course.
” There was a pause. “You know what I do?”

Alan Hibbet was one of the dozens of innocuous NUMA scientists who toiled anonymously in the heart of the great oceanographic organization, content to do research of vital importance in exotic subjects with little fanfare. A few months earlier, Austin had heard Hibbet speak at a NUMA symposium on at-sea communication and environmental monitoring. He'd been impressed with the breadth of the man's knowledge.

“I know very well what you do. You're a specialist in applied electromagnetism, with expertise in antennae. You're responsible for designing the electronic eyes and ears NUMA uses to probe the deep and maintain communications among its far-flung operations. I read your paper on the effect of ground plane size on the radiation patterns produced by reduced surface antennae.”

“You
did
? I'm flattered. I'm basically a tinkerer. I think of the Special Assignments Team as swashbucklers.” Austin and his team were legends around NUMA, and Hibbet was stunned at being asked to help.

Austin laughed ruefully. His arm muscles were still sore from rescuing Paul Trout and he was dog-tired. “I think there's more buckle than swash in the team these days. We could really use your expertise.”

“I'll be glad to help in any way I can,” Hibbet said.

Austin gave Hibbet directions to the boathouse, and said he looked forward to seeing him in the morning. He made some notes in a yellow legal pad while the thoughts were fresh in his head. Then he prepared a full pot of Kenyan coffee, put the coffeemaker on automatic and went upstairs to his turret bedroom. He undressed, slid between the cool sheets and quickly fell asleep. It seemed only minutes before he was awakened by the bright morning sunlight streaming into his bedroom window.

He showered and shaved, got dressed comfortably in T-shirt and shorts, and whipped together an order of scrambled eggs and Virginia ham, which he ate on the deck. He had just finished clearing away the dishes when Zavala knocked on the door. The Trouts showed up a few minutes later with Professor Adler. Al Hibbet arrived at the same time. Hibbet was a tall, thin man with a shock of white hair. He was almost painfully shy, and his skin was as pale as marble, both consequences of spending most of his days in a laboratory away from human contact and sunlight.

Austin handed each person a mug of coffee and herded them to a round, teakwood table on the deck. Austin could have called the meeting at his office in the green-tinted tower in Arlington that was the center of NUMA's operations. But he wasn't ready to answer questions or share his thoughts with anyone outside his innermost circle until he had gathered more facts. He pulled up a chair and gazed longingly at the sun-sparkled river where he usually spent his morning rowing for exercise, then glanced around the table and thanked everyone for coming. He felt like Van Helsing calling together a strategy meeting to battle Dracula, and was tempted to ask if anyone brought the garlic.

Instead, he got right to the point. “Something very odd has been going on in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans,” he began. “The sea is being stirred up like eggs in a bowl. These disturbances have sunk one ship, and possibly two, that we know of, nearly sank another, and have scared a year's growth off some of the people seated around this table, including yours truly.” He turned to Adler. “Professor, would you be kind enough to describe the phenomena we've witnessed, and hold forth with some of your theories.”

“I'd be glad to,” Adler said. He recounted the disappearance of the “unsinkable”
Southern Belle
and the successful search for the lost ship. He described the satellite evidence confirming the existence of giant waves in the ship's vicinity. Last, and with slightly less enthusiasm, he talked about his theory that the disturbances may not have been of natural origin. As he explained his thoughts, he looked from face to face as if he were searching for a hint of doubt. To his relief, he saw only seriousness and interest.

“Normally, we might attribute all this strange ocean activity to King Neptune kicking up his heels, but for a couple of things,” he said. “Satellite imagery suggests that other areas of the oceans have been similarly disturbed, and that there is an unusual symmetry to the disturbances.” Using Austin's laptop, he showed the satellite images of the killer wave concentrations.

Austin asked the Trouts to describe their descent into the maelstrom. Again, there was silence as Gamay and Paul took turns telling about being sucked into the vortex and their last-minute rescue.

“You say there was lightning at the time this whirlpool first materialized?” Hibbet said.

Gamay and Paul nodded.

Hibbet's reply was succinct. He only said, “Ah.”

Zavala picked up the story thread, and told the group about boarding the resurrected ship. Hibbet was keenly interested in his description of the power plant and the damaged electrical framework on deck.

“I wish I could have been there to see it,” he said.

“I can do the next best thing,” Zavala said. Moments later, the digital photos he had taken of the mystery ship were displayed on the computer screen.

Austin asked Hibbet what he made of the images. The NUMA scientist stared at the screen with a furrowed brow, and asked for a second run-through of the photos.

“It's fairly obvious that a great deal of electrical power is being fed into a central point.” He pointed to the cone-shaped framework. “It's hard to know what this apparatus is for in its present state.”

“Joe described it as a giant spark plug,” Austin said.

Hibbet scratched his head. “Probably not. More like a giant Tesla coil. Many of the circuits that make this thing tick are not visible. Where is the ship now?”

“It sank to the bottom of the sea again,” Zavala said.

Hibbet's reaction wasn't what Austin expected. There was excitement in his gray eyes as he rubbed his palms together. “This beats fiddling around with antennae any day.” He clicked through the computer pictures again, then he glanced around the table. “Anyone here familiar with the work of Nikola Tesla?”

“I'm the only one who reads
Popular Science
on a regular basis,” Zavala said. “Tesla invented alternating current.”

Tibbet nodded. “He was a Serbian American electrical engineer. He discovered that you could rotate a magnetic field if you took two coils at right angles and juiced them with AC current out of phase.”

“I wonder if you might put that in English,” Adler said politely.

Hibbet laughed. “I'll put it in a historic context. Tesla moved to the United States and worked for Thomas Edison. They became rivals. Edison advocated direct current, and there was a fierce battle. Tesla got the edge when he was commissioned to design the AC generators at Niagara Falls. He sold the patents to his induction motor to George Westinghouse, whose power system was the basis for what we use today. Edison had to be content with the electric lightbulb and the phonograph.”

“Tesla filed a bunch of wild patents, as I recall,” Zavala said.

“That's right. He was an eccentric genius. He filed a patent for an unmanned electrically propelled aircraft that could fly at eighteen thousand miles per hour and could be used as a weapon. He came up with something called ‘teleforce,' which was a death ray that could melt airplane engines at a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. He did a lot of work on wireless transmission of electricity. He was fascinated by the possibility of focusing electrical force and amplifying its effect. He even claimed to have once produced an earthquake from his lab.”