Polar Shift (35 page)

The steamer and its motorcycle escort raced across the smoke-filled open field between the Union and Confederate troops, who were drawn out in long lines facing each other. The musket and cannon fire halted. Austin heard a sound he hadn't expected. Applause.

“Why are those idiots clapping?” Karla said.

“They must think it's part of the act.” Austin let out a blood-curdling screech as they passed between the opposing armies.

There was alarm in Karla's face. “Are you all right?”

Austin flashed a grin. “Hell, yes. I've always wanted to do a rebel yell. Hold on.”

They were through the battlefield and headed toward a line of cannon brought in for the occasion. Austin braked so he could veer sharply off without a rollover. The bikers maintained their speed, and saw an opportunity to close in. The two leading bikers were only a few yards from the steamer's left and right fenders.

Karla looked at the rider on the right and shouted, “He's got a gun!”

The biker was steering with one hand, and with the other he rested a gun on his arm with the muzzle pointed at Karla's head. Austin didn't think; he simply reacted. He jerked the wheel over and back.

The heavy bumper crunched the rider's right leg. The bike wob-bled as it fought to remain upright. Then the motorcycle flipped, tossing the biker like an angry steer. Austin tried to nail the other motorcycle, but the rider saw what had happened to his pal and easily skated off beyond reach.

The car flew up a hill without slowing, then down the other side. Austin could see cars ahead, moving along a road that skirted the perimeter of the field. He had to dodge a stone wall and split-rail fencing, but, a moment later, the Stanley leaped over the berm and landed across two lanes of highway.

He straightened the steering wheel and increased throttle. On the hard pavement, the car changed into a playful young filly that wanted to run. The hard rubber tires whirred on the macadam. He passed a couple of cars with the bikers hot on his tail, and once he was clear of traffic let the car's speed creep up to eighty. He saw a sign warning of a turnoff and feathered the brakes. The bikers fell back, suspecting a ploy.

Austin wheeled the car onto an access ramp. The Stanley shot onto the main highway. Austin weaved in and out, but each time he tried the maneuver the more agile bikers stayed with him. He tried to shake them by increasing speed. He was doing ninety, then one hundred miles an hour. He could barely see with the wind blowing in his face.

“Where's a traffic cop when you need one?” he yelled.

Karla was scrunched down in her seat, trying to avoid the full blast of air.

“What?”

“Do you have a cell phone?”

“You want to make a telephone call?” she said in disbelief.

“No, I want
you
to make one. Call the state police and tell them there's a maniac in an old red car being chased by a bunch of bikers in Civil War uniforms.
That
should get their attention.”

Karla nodded and dug in her pocket for a phone. She punched out an emergency number. When she got through to the police, she conveyed Austin's message. “They say they'll have someone check it out,” she said. “I'm not sure they believed me.”

The bikers were moving up again. Austin was pushing the car's envelope. He should have been dealing with the various controls governing water level, fuel pressure, pilot and other functions, but he was too busy staying on the road.

A moving shadow appeared suddenly on the highway. Austin glanced up and to the side. A helicopter was pacing them. “
That
was fast!”

“It's not the police,” Karla said. “It's a television station traffic helicopter.”

The helicopter appeared overhead and easily kept up with the chase. Austin frantically scoured his brain for a plan, but he had exhausted all his options. The car flew past an off-ramp. Austin glanced in the mirror and saw the bikes slow, then make a turn onto the ramp.

“Our friends have deserted us,” he said.

Karla turned just as the last Rebel soldier turned off the highway. “Why?” she said.

“Camera shy. They don't want to be on the six o'clock news.”

He slowed the car down to a manageable sixty. He and Karla waved up at the helicopter.

They were still waving when three Virginia State Police cruisers caught up with them. Austin heeded the phalanx of flashing lights and the wail of sirens and pulled off the highway. The Stanley was immediately surrounded by armed police officers. Austin suggested to Karla that she keep her hands where the police could see them. Once the police got past their nervousness and checked Austin's license and NUMA ID, they seemed more interested in the steamer than its occupants.

Austin told them about the six bikers who had tried to force them off the road. At his suggestion, they talked with someone at NUMA, who vouched for Austin. The television station backed up the biker story. After about an hour, Austin got his license back, and was told he and Karla were free to go.

They stopped at a car wash to clean the grass and dirt off the car body. Austin was amazed to see that the car hadn't been damaged. People who were leaving the battlefield smiled and waved when they saw the steamer drive up a short while later. A tall man with dark hair and opaline eyes was waiting patiently for them.

Austin braked the car to a halt and smiled. “Hi, Dirk. Thanks for the car loan.”

“I saw you go flying between the battlefield lines with the Hell's Angels on your tail. What's going on?”

“This is Karla Janos. Karla, Dirk Pitt.”

Pitt gave Karla his best smile. “I was looking forward to meeting you, Miss Janos.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“How fast did you have her up to?” he asked Austin.

“Around a hundred.”

“Impressive,” Pitt said. “I've only had her up to ninety.”

“Sorry to borrow your car without asking. We needed transportation in a hurry. Someone tried to kill us.”

“It's only a replica. Don't worry about it.” Pitt checked the car for damage, and, seeing none, said, “Not everyone owns a car that was in the third battle of Bull Run.”

Austin's cell phone started playing the blues. He excused himself and put the phone up to his ear. Barrett was calling, and he sounded excited. There was a muffled engine roar in the background.

“I can barely hear you,” Austin said. “What's that noise?”

“I always think better when I'm riding. I think I've got it.”

“Got what?”

“The nursery rhyme. It was code. I've got the formula for the antidote.”

Austin couldn't believe his ears. “Say that again.”

“The
antidote
,” Barrett yelled, thinking Austin was simply not hearing over the noise of the motorcyle. “I've got Lazlo Kovacs's antidote for polar shift.”

S
HORTLY AFTER THE HOT
Brazilian sun dropped below the mountains, the handsome, 350-foot-long expedition vessel
Polar Adventure
slipped out of Rio de Janeiro harbor and headed on a southerly course toward the open waters of the Atlantic at its cruising speed of fifteen knots.

The
Polar Adventure
had been built by Danish shipbuilders in the late 1990s, and had enjoyed a busy schedule that took it to the Mediterranean, Europe, Greenland and most recently on Antarctic cruises. The ship had been purchased from its owners by a straw company set up expressly for that purpose by Gant's foundation.

The acquisition was purely an accounting device. On the books, the millions of dollars spent to acquire and refurbish the ship had been earmarked to build a factory in Santiago, Chile. The
Adventure
had been designed as a smaller version of the great ocean liners. The builders had lavishly decorated the decks and cabins with varnished wood and brass. Passengers could enjoy their voyage from the comfort of the outside cabins, the window-lined dining room, lounge, observation and covered promenade decks, or from an observation platform below the bridge.

As the ship plowed through the South Atlantic, Gant and Margrave stood on a balcony deep in the heart of the vessel. It overlooked a vast open space. A tall, cone-shaped metal structure, supported by extensive framework, rose from the center point of the space. Thick cables snaked out from the cone to four massive dynamos, two on either side of the structure. A covered moon pool below the cone allowed it to be lowered into the ocean.

“We essentially gutted every nonessential space below the main deck to make room for this setup,” Margrave said with a sweep of his hand. “After our initial crude experiments, we decided that we didn't need four ships. One vessel, properly outfitted, could produce enough power to get the job done. We had been concentrating the low-frequency transmissions to a central point from the four ships.”

“Which, as I understand it,” Gant said, “created a scattering of the electromagnetic vibrations along the periphery of the target area, setting off unexpected waves and whirlpools like the ones that sank our transmitter ship and the
Southern Belle
.”

“Right. We solved that problem by using the single transmitter you see here, with an increase in the power level. It also meant that we didn't have to build a new ship to replace the one destroyed in the initial experiments. We simply moved dynamos from the other three ships and added one.”

“Are you satisfied with the crew I got you?”

“They look like a bunch of cutthroats, but they know their way around a ship.”

“They
should
. They've cut their share of throats. I used my old business contacts to recruit them. They're all former pirates who went to work for an ocean-protection arm of our security company.”

The two men left the transmitter hold and strolled along the polished wooden floor of the promenade deck until they came to the observation deck below the bridge. Windows that wrapped around the outside of the comfortably furnished platform offered a view of the sharp bow cutting its way through the ocean.

“This is where the passengers would normally observe wildlife,” Margrave said. “We'll be watching the reversal with our electronic eyes.”

He pressed a wall button and a screen dropped down showing a diagram of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. “I've always liked home movies,” Gant said.

“You'll especially like these,” Margrave said with a chuckle. “We'll have the entire target area under surveillance with our lead-shielded satellites. We'll be able to see the giant waves and whirlpools developing on the periphery of our target area. Should be quite spectacular!”

“Not
too
spectacular, I hope.”

“Don't tell me you believe those phony warnings from Austin and his friends.”

“I'm a political person, not a scientific one. But I do know that Austin was trying to torpedo this project with scare tactics.” He smiled. “Maybe I'd do the same thing if I were in his place helplessly watching something that I couldn't stop.”

“We didn't take the Kovacs Theorems at face value. We've run the computer models dozens of times. The waves and vortexes along the edge of the target will spin outward. We don't think there is much shipping in the area, but collateral damage is sometimes unavoidable in any great enterprise.”

“Our compasses will change immediately?”

“That's our estimate. Our navigation equipment will be recalibrated just before we start the reversal and will work off our shielded satellites.” He offered his most satanic grin. “We'll be the only ship in the world able to navigate. Should be quite the mess out there.”

“Tell me more about the target area,” Gant said.

“You can see it up there on the screen. Our friend the South Atlantic Anomaly. As I've explained before, it's essentially a ‘dip' in the magnetosphere where there is less natural shielding.” He pointed to an intersection where lines of latitude and longitude crossed. “About three hundred miles off the coast of Brazil is this area of weakest polarity, where a natural polar shift would occur.”

“The new North Pole,” Gant said.

Margrave laughed. “I can't wait to see the faces on the leading Elites when they discover that Lucifer's warnings had some teeth to them.”

Gant spread his lips in his warmest smile. He couldn't wait to see Margrave's face when he learned that all the work and fortune he had put into the polar shift project would benefit the very Elites that he despised.

B
ARRETT SAT IN A
quiet corner table of the dark-beamed tap-room of the Leesburg country tavern. He was scribbling madly on a napkin, his head bent low over his work. The table was covered with dozens of crumpled napkins. An untouched mug of beer sat by his right elbow. He was oblivious to the glances the other customers were casting at the spider decorating his bald pate.

Austin and Karla sat at the table. Sensing that he had company, Barrett looked up with a faraway look in his eyes. He grinned when he saw their faces.

“You don't know how glad I am to see you. I'm about ready to explode.”

“Please don't do that just yet,” Austin said. He asked Karla what she wanted to drink and ordered two black and tans, a combination of Guinness and lager.

Racing around the Virginia countryside in an open car had made them thirsty. When the beers came, Austin slugged down half of his, and Karla blissfully buried her nose in the foamy head.

Before heading off to meet Barrett, Austin had given Pitt an update on the polar shift situation. Pitt had said he would call Sandecker, who was returning the next day from a diplomatic trip, and set up a briefing with the president when he got back from a tour inspecting tornado damage in the Midwest. In the meantime, he wanted Austin to meet with the Pentagon. As an added bonus, he gave Austin carte blanche with NUMA's vast resources.

“Sorry to take so long,” Austin said, savoring the cool brew that trickled down his throat. “We came as soon as we could. There was background noise when you called, and I'm not sure I understood you correctly,” Austin said. “You said something about the nursery rhyme, but I didn't get the rest.”

“After you left for Manassas, I started fooling around with Karla's bedtime rhyme. The title, ‘Topsy-Turvy,' and some of the lines fit in with what we know about polar shift. It seemed too close to be coincidental.”

“I've found that few things are coincidental,” Austin said. “However, it's a coincidence that I'm still thirsty and there's an untouched beer on the table.”

“I'm too cranked up to drink.” Barrett shoved the beer across to Austin, who shared half of it with Karla.

“We were talking about coincidences,” Austin said.

Barrett nodded. “Kovacs was an amateur cryptologist. I started with the premise that the rhyme might be a cipher. I guessed that the topsy-turvy couplets were simply ‘nulls'—letters or words placed in a cipher to confuse—so I put them aside and stuck with the main body of the verse. A cipher is different from a code, which usually requires a codebook to make the translation. To unlock a cipher, you have to have a key, which is included in the message itself. One phrase jumped out immediately.”

“The key is in the door,” Karla said without thinking.

“That's the one! It seemed obvious, almost
too
obvious,” Barrett said, “but Kovacs was a scientist who would have been obsessed with precision. It would have been more precise for him to have said that the key is in the
lock
.”

“The key was in the word
door
itself,” Austin said.

“That was my thinking,” Barrett said. “
Door
became my key word. You have to look at code breaking in a couple of ways. At one level, you're dealing with the mechanics of things, such as word or letter transpositions and substitutions. At another level, you're looking at the
meaning
of things.” Seeing his explanation greeted with blank looks, he said, “What does a door do?”

“That's easy,” Karla said. “It separates one room from another. You have to open and close it to pass through.”

“Correct,” Barrett said. “The word's opening letter is
D
.”

He grabbed a clean napkin and with his ballpoint pen wrote:

“This sets the pattern of letters for the plain alphabet. I took the last letter in
door
and used it in the same configuration for the cipher alphabet.”

“Let me try,” Karla said. Taking the pen, she wrote:

“I'm buying you a ticket to Bletchley Park,” Barrett said, referring to the British code-breaking headquarters during World War II.

“Using the alphabets to write the word
message
, you'd still get gibberish.” Karla stared at the word with disappointment in her eyes.

“Your grandfather didn't want to make it too easy. I came up with the same result. Then I went back to the key word.
D
and
R
are four spaces apart in the word
door
. I wrote down every fourth word in the main verse, but my gut feeling told me that it was too much. So I tried every fourth
letter
. Still nothing I could sink my teeth in. Then I thought,
D
and
R
are
fifteen
letters apart in the alphabet. I used that formula in the poem and picked out every fifteenth word. Then I used the plain and cipher alphabets to attempt the cryptanalysis. Are you still with me?”

“No,” Austin said.

“Yeah, that's what happened to me too,” Barrett said with a grin. “So I cheated. I ran the whole bloody mess through a computer.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a computer printout. “This is what I got.”

“A mishmash of vowels and consonants, but no words,” Karla said.

“I tried everything. I called up an MIT professor who spoke Hungarian and ran it by him. No go. Then I remembered Kovacs spoke Romanian, and called up a guy who runs the Transylvania Restaurant back in Seattle. He couldn't make heads nor tails of it. I would have torn my hair out, if I had any. I went back to the words that I had discarded, particularly
turvy-topsy
. I thought maybe it applied to what I was doing.”

“How could you turn the message upside down?” Karla said with skepticism.

“I couldn't. But I could interpret the words loosely, and run it
backward
, like the second line of the poem. Which is what I did. Still didn't make sense. Then I had an epiphany. As I rode around on my bike, I realized that it wasn't
supposed
to be words. It was exactly what it was, a string of letters, more or less. Once I jumped that hurdle, I figured that there were numbers in the message as well. Back to the computer. Certain letters were
indicators
that meant the next letter was actually a number.
A
preceded by another letter equals 1,
B
equals 2 and so on.”

“You've lost me again,” Austin said. From the puzzled look on Karla's face, she was wandering around in cipher land as well.

Barrett set the computer page aside and picked up the napkin in both hands. “This is an
equation
.”

“An equation for
what
?” Austin said.

“By itself, the message doesn't make sense, but we've got to look at it in context. Kovacs intended that the message would be seen by only one person: Karla. He said she would always have the poem when you needed it.”

“Are you saying what I think you're saying?” Austin said.

“I just figured this out a few minutes ago, so I can't be sure until I put it to the test,” Barrett said. “But Kovacs could have given us a set of electromagnetic frequencies.”

“The
antidote
,” Karla whispered.

Austin gingerly picked up the napkin as if it would fall apart. “This is the frequency that can neutralize a polar shift?”

Barrett's Adam's apple bobbed a couple of times “Hell, I
hope
so,” he said.

Karla leaned over and kissed Barrett on the top of his bald head. “You've
done
it.”

Barrett looked downhearted for someone who had saved the world. “Maybe. I'm afraid we don't have much time.”

“What do you mean?” Austin said.

“After our meeting, I listened to the phone conversations transmitted by the electronic bug you planted on Gant's estate. He and Margrave talked. They've left the country by now.”

“Damn,” Austin said. “Where did they go?”

“I don't know. Margrave never got around to telling me the plans for the final phase. But it's not where I'm worried about, but
what
. I think they're about to put their plans for a polar reversal into effect.”

“Any estimate on how long we have?”

“Hard to tell,” Barrett said. “The target location is in the South Atlantic. I wasn't in on the final discussions, so I don't know the exact spot. Once they're on-site, it's only a matter of hours before they pull the switch.”

Austin handed the napkin back to Barrett. “Can this equation be translated into something we can use to actually neutralize the reversal?”

“Sure. The same way E = mc
²
was translated into the Bomb and nuclear power. All you need are the resources and the time.”

“You'll get all the resources you need. How long will you need to build something that will do the job?”

“I'll need help. I provided the engineering and made the scale model for the trigger device, but others worked on the actual construction.”

“I'll get you help. How long?”

Barrett gave him a bleak smile. “Seventy-two hours.
Maybe
.”

“I think I heard you say thirty-six,” Austin said. “How big will this device be?”

“
Really
big,” Barrett said. “You saw the setup on the transmitter ship.”

“Ouch,” Austin said. His unshakable confidence wavered for a second, but his agile mind was already cranking into gear. “What do you do with this thing once you get it built?”

“It has to transmit electromagnetic waves covering roughly the same area as the polar shift.” He shook his head. “We're going to have to figure out how to transport the neutralizer to the target area. Damn. I feel so responsible for this whole mess.”

Despite Barrett's biker appearance, he had a fragile psyche. Austin saw that guilt was tearing the brilliant computer whiz apart, and if that happened he would be of no use.

“Then I can't think of anyone who would be better at cleaning it up. Leave the transportation to me. I've got an idea that might work.”

He rose from his chair and put some bills down on the table for the beers. As they left the tavern, Austin saw Spider head toward his motorcycle and said, “Where are you going?”

“To ride my bike.”

“I'll have someone pick it up,” Austin said, taking him by the arm. “Too dangerous.”

Karla grabbed Barrett by the other arm, and they steered him to the Jeep. On the way back to Washington, Austin got on his cell phone, called Zavala and said he had an important job for him to do.

“I'll get right on it,” Zavala said after hearing the details. “I talked to the Trouts. Good news. They traced the transmitter ship to Rio via satellite and are on their way.”

L
ESS THAN
an hour later, Austin pulled into the NUMA parking garage with Barrett and Karla and they took the elevator to the third floor. The corridors were silent and dark except for a shaft of light coming from the study next to the conference room. Zavala had brought Hibbet in as Austin had requested.

Austin said, “Thanks for coming, Alan. Sorry for yanking you here a second time, but we need your help.”

“I meant it when I told you to call night or day if you needed me. Is there anything new since we talked the last time?”

“We've confirmed that the whirlpool and giant waves were side effects of an experiment in causing a polar reversal. And that the magnetic reversal could trigger a geologic reversal with catastrophic implications for the world.”

Hibbet's face turned ashen. “Is there any way to stop this from happening?”

Austin's lips tightened in a thin smile. “I'm hoping that you can tell us.”

“Me? I don't understand.”

“This is Spider Barrett,” Austin said. “He designed the mechanism to trigger a polar reversal.”

Hibbet glanced at the sad-faced Barrett and his tattooed head. He'd been around long enough to know that the sciences attracted its share of oddballs. He extended his hand. “Brilliant work.”

Barrett beamed at the professional recognition. “Thanks.”