Polar Shift (37 page)

A
USTIN REACHED INTO HIS
desk drawer, extracted a dart from a board game and had his hand poised to throw it at the chart of the Atlantic Ocean pinned to the wall when the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver. It was Paul Trout calling from Rio.

“Hope I'm not interrupting anything important,” Trout said.

“Not at all. I was bringing my scientific training to bear on a knotty puzzle. How's the girl from Ipanema?” Austin said.

“Gamay is fine. But there's something strange going on with the transmitter ships. I snuck on board one a few minutes ago. It's been stripped of its turbines and the electromagnetic antenna. I suspect someone has done a similar housecleaning with the other ships.”

“Empty?” Austin raced through the possibilities in his mind. “They must have done the housecleaning when the ships were in the Mississippi boatyard.”

“We should have figured that something funny was going on. The ships are just sitting there, tied up to the dock. No preparations. Nothing to indicate that they're going to sea anytime soon. Only one ship has left the dock since we've been here, and that was an ocean liner.”

Austin was deep in thought and only half listening to Trout. “What's that you said about a liner?”

“The
Polar Adventure
. It was tied up next to the transmitter ships, but it left earlier today. Is it important?”

“Maybe. Joe says a liner left the shipyard in Mississippi about the same time as the transmitters.”

“Wow! Think this is the same vessel we saw?”

“It's possible,” Austin said. “They move the transmitters into the liner. Then, while we're watching the decoys, the liner sneaks away with the payload in broad daylight.”

“So much for the navy's plans to tail the ships with a submarine.”

“Classic ‘bait and switch' operation. Damned clever.”

“How long since the liner left port?”

“It was gone this morning.”

Austin did a quick mental computation. “They could be hundreds of miles out to sea by now. That's a jackrabbit start.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“Stay put for now, and keep an eye on the ships in case their owners have another card up their sleeve.”

Austin clicked off. He was angry with himself for not anticipating that anyone intelligent enough to carry out a polar reversal would do everything possible to throw pursuers off their trail. He turned his attention back to the chart. It was a big ocean. With every passing minute, the liner came closer to losing itself in hundreds of square miles of open sea. He thought about calling the Pentagon with the news from Trout, but he was in no mood to waste his breath debating the assistant defense secretary.

Sandecker might be more successful, but even he would have to deal with the Pentagon bureaucracy, and there was simply no time. Screw 'em, Austin thought. If the world was going to end, he would rather have the responsibility on his shoulders than those of an anonymous government functionary with an attitude. This was going to be a NUMA deal, through and through.

Ten minutes later, he was in a NUMA vehicle driving through the quiet streets of Washington. He took the highway to Washington National Airport, where the guard at the gate of a restricted area checked his ID and directed Austin to a hanger in a far corner of the airfield. He could see the glow of lights, and easily made his way to where a Boeing 747 jumbo jet was parked on the tarmac.

Floodlights set up on stands ringed the huge plane and turned night into day. The plane was surrounded by drums of electrical cable and stacks of aluminum and steel. Workers crawled in and out of the plane like ants on a candy bar.

Zavala sat under the lofty tail of the plane at a makeshift table assembled from a sheet of plywood and a couple of sawhorses. He was going over blueprints with a man dressed in coveralls. He excused himself when he saw Austin and came over to greet him.

“It's not as bad as it looks,” he said. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the noise.

Austin glanced around and was relieved to see a semblance of order in what at first seemed to be total chaos.

“How long before the bird is ready to fly?” Austin said.

“We've had a few glitches, but all the stuff is here. It's mostly a matter of fitting everything in and connecting it. Seventy-two hours should do it.”

“How about tomorrow morning?” Austin said.

Zavala smiled. “You should get a slot on Comedy Central.”

“Unfortunately, there's nothing comic about the news I just received from Paul.” He told Zavala about the missing liner. “Could you assemble the rest of the setup while we're in the air?”

Zavala winced. “Possible, but not advisable. It would be like trying to stuff a sausage on the run.”

“What if there's no choice but to try?”

Zavala looked at the hectic activity and scratched his head. “I never could resist a juicy sausage. C'mon while I break the bad news to my right-hand man.”

The man Zavala had been reviewing blueprints with was Drew Wheeler, an amiable Virginian in his forties who was a NUMA specialist in the logistics of moving big payloads around the world. Austin had worked with Drew on a few projects where heavy equipment was needed in a hurry. Wheeler's tendency to think things through, as if he were mentally chewing on a plug of tobacco, could drive people who worked with him to distraction. But they soon learned that he had a knack for laying out complex plans in his head so they could be executed seamlessly.

Austin asked how things were going and got the typical Wheeler response. He cocked an elbow on one hip and squinted at the plane from under his eyebrows like a farmer trying to figure out how to remove a tree trunk from a field. “Well,” he said, pausing before he answered. “Things are going okay.”

“Are they okay enough to get this plane off the ground tomorrow morning?”

Wheeler chewed the question over for a moment before he replied. “What time tomorrow morning?”

“As soon as you can make it.”

Wheeler nodded. “I'll see what I can do.”

He ambled back to the plane as if out for a casual walk. Austin wasn't fooled. “I'll bet you a bottle of Pancho Villa tequila that Drew's already figured out how to do this.”

“I know him well enough to recognize that's a sucker bet,” Zavala said.

“A wise decision. Where did you get the plane?”

“You'd be surprised what you can lease these days if you've got deep pockets. It's the 200F freighter, a modified version of the passenger 747. It's got a capacity of nearly 250 thousand pounds. The main problem was to get all the hardware you see lying around into the plane without having to crack it open like a can of sardines. We tossed the problem around awhile with Hibbet and Barrett,” Zavala said. “I had it in my mind that we'd have to go with massive generators like the ones we saw on the transmitter ship. But Barrett said it wasn't necessary. We could use smaller generators, just more of them.”

“What about the coil?” Austin said.

“That gave us the biggest headache. I'll show you what we did.”

Zavala led the way to the nose of the giant plane. Two people in coveralls were bent over a dishlike structure set up on a platform. Al Hibbet smiled when he saw Austin and Zavala walking in his direction.

“Hello, Al,” Austin said. “Having fun yet?”

“The most fun I can remember since I got an electric motor for my Tinkertoy set. Karla has been a big help.”

The other worker looked up and revealed Karla's smiling face under a baseball cap. “What the professor means is that I'm a great help holding a screwdriver.”

“Not at all,” Hibbet said. “Karla may not have a technical background, but she has an instinct for solving problems. She has obviously inherited her grandfather's genes.”

“Glad to hear you're working well together,” Austin said. “Joe said you had a problem with the coil.”

“That's right,” Hibbet said. “In the transmitter ships, they dangled the antenna below the ship. We were going to sling it under the fuselage.”

“Would that be a problem during takeoff?”

“You hit on the problem. This is the radome for the newly designed antenna. I got the idea from some of the setups I've seen on early-warning aircraft. It was Karla's suggestion to redesign the cone to fit into the dome.”

“I used to have guppies in my fish tank,” Karla said. “They have a pouch under their chin that gave me the idea.”

Hibbet whipped a plastic covering off a metal-and-wire construction about twenty feet across. The circular framework that sat in a wooden cradle was shaped like an inverted coolie hat. It was flat on top, with shallow sides coming to a point on the bottom.

“Ingenious,” Austin said. “It looks like a squashed-down version of the cone antenna. Will it work as well?”

“
Better
, I hope,” Hibbet said.

“That's good, because we've revised our schedule. We need everything ready to fly out by tomorrow morning. Can you assemble the final stages while we're in the air?”

Hibbet pinched his chin. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “It's not the ideal way to do something this complex. We won't even have a chance to test the turbines. But we can start going down the punch list as soon as we mount the antenna and dome. We'd better ask Barrett for his opinion.”

They climbed a gangway into the 747's vast interior. A line of sixteen squat steel cylinders, spaced evenly apart, ran nearly the entire 230-foot length of the airplane's cargo space. A network of cables connected the cylinders and snaked off in dozens of different directions. Barrett was kneeling over a cable between two of the cylinders.

He saw Austin and the others and got up to greet them.

Austin glanced around at the complex arrangement taking up a good part of the plane's enormous interior. “Looks like you've got enough power capacity to light up the city of New York.”

“Almost,” Barrett said. “It was a bit of a problem hooking up the power source, but we finally jury-rigged a system that should work okay.”

“I'm more curious about the dynamos. Where did you get so many at such short notice?”

“Special order from NUMA,” Zavala said. “They were going to go into some new ships before I borrowed them temporarily.”

“New power source. New antenna. Is it all going to come together?”

“I think so,” Barrett said. “That is, I'm ninety-nine percent sure, according to the computer models I've done.”

Austin shook his head. “It's that
one
percent that worries me. Can we do it all by tomorrow morning?”

Barrett chuckled, thinking Austin was joking. Then he noticed the serious expression in Austin's eyes. “Something going on?'

Austin relayed Trout's account of the mysterious liner.

Barrett slammed his fist into his palm. “I told Tris months ago about my idea of using a single ship to concentrate the transmission. I even gave him the plans for the switch. He said it would take too much time. Guess I shouldn't be surprised he was lying again.”

“About that schedule?” Austin said.

Barrett's eyes blazed with anger. “We'll be ready,” he said.

Leaving Barrett to his work, Austin and the others climbed back down the plane's gangway. Austin asked where he could pitch in. Zavala ticked off a short list of last-minute supplies. Austin walked away from the activity where it was quieter and made his phone calls. In every instance, he was told that the material would be delivered quickly. He was walking back to the plane when he saw that Karla had followed him. She had evidently been watching as he made the calls.

“I've got a favor to ask,” she said. “I want to go on the plane.”

“This is the part where the hero says, ‘It could be dangerous,'” Austin said.

“I know. But it was also dangerous back on Ivory Island.”

Austin hesitated.

“Besides,” Karla said. “What could be more risky than riding with you in a Stanley Steamer?”

Austin would have to tie Karla up to keep her from boarding the plane. He smiled and said, “Neither of us is going anywhere unless we get back to work.”

She threw her arms around him and planted a warm kiss on his lips. Austin vowed to devote more time to pleasure after this job was done.

As they made their way back to the plane, a car pulled up. A tall figure got out from behind the steering wheel and limped toward them. It was Schroeder.

“What are you doing here?” Karla said.

“I'm more curious about how you got past the gate,” Austin said.

“The usual formula. A combination of bravado and false identification.”

“You're supposed to be resting in a hospital bed,” Karla scolded.