Shock Wave

  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?"

  "The Dorsett mine on Gladiator Island," Sandecker said, tempering the awe in his voice.

  Ames nodded. "As good a choice as any. The intensity of the energy would not have the strength to kill humans after making a round trip. But it should put the fear of God in them and give them one hell of a headache."

  This was the end of the line. Pitt thought bitterly. This was as far as any human was expected to go.

  This was the conclusion of the valiant effort, the future desires and loves and joys of each one of them.

  Their end would
come in the water as food for the fish, the pitiful remains of their bodies sinking a thousand fathoms to the desolate bottom of the sea. Maeve never to see her sons again, Pitt mourned by his mother and father and his many friends at NUMA. Giordino's memorial service, Pitt mused with a last vestige of humor, would be well attended, with an impressive number of grieving women, any one of whom could have been a beauty queen.

  The little boat that had carried them so far through so much chaos was literally coming apart at the seams. The crack along the bottom of the hull lengthened fractionally with every wave that carried the boat over its crest. The buoyancy tubes would keep them afloat, but when the hull parted for good and the pieces went their separate ways, they would all be thrown in the merciless water, clinging helplessly to the wreckage and vulnerable to the ever-present sharks.

  For the moment the sea was fairly calm. From crest to trough, the waves rolled just under a meter. But if the weather suddenly became unsettled and the sea kicked up, death would do more than merely stare them in the eyes. The old man with the scythe would embrace them quickly without further hesitation.

  Pitt hunched over the rudder in the stern, listening to the now familiar scrape and splash of the bailer.

  His intense green eyes, sore and swollen, scanned the horizon as the orb of the morning sun flushed from a golden-orange glow to flaming yellow. He searched, hoping against hope that a hint of land might rise above the clean straight horizon of the sea surrounding them. He searched in vain. No ship, aircraft or island revealed itself. Except for a few small clouds trailing to the southeast a good twenty kilometers away, Pitt's world was as empty as the plains of Mars, the boat little more than a pinprick on a vast seascape.

  After catching enough fish to start a seafood restaurant, hunger was not an anxiety. Their water supply, if conserved, was good for at least another six or seven days. It was the fatigue and lack of sleep caused by the constant bailing to keep the boat afloat that was taking a toll. Every hour was misery. Without a bowl or a bottle of any kind, they were forced to splash the incoming water overboard with their cupped hands until Pitt devised a container from the waterproof packet that held the accessories he had smuggled past the Dorsetts. When tied to a pair of wrenches to form a concave receptacle, it could expel a liter of seawater with one scoop.

  At first they labored in four-hour shifts, because Maeve demanded she carry her share of the exertion.

  She worked gamely, fighting the stiffness that soon attacked the joints of her arms and wrists, followed by agonizing muscle aches. The grit and guts were there, but she did not have the natural strength of either man. The shifts soon were divided and allocated by stamina. Maeve bailed for three hours before being spelled by Pitt, who struggled for five. Giordino then took over and refused any relief until he had put in a full eight hours.

  As the seam split farther and farther apart, the water no longer seeped, but rather spurted like a long fountain. The sea pried its way in faster than it could be cast out. With their backs against the wall and no trace of relief in sight, they slowly began to lose their steadfastness.

  "Damn Arthur Dorsett," Pitt shouted in his mind. "Damn Boudicca, damn Deirdre!" The murderous waste, the uselessness of it all made no sense. He and Maeve were no major threat to Dorsett's fanatical dreams of empire. Alone, they never could have stopped him, or even slowed him down. It was a pure act of sadism to set them adrift.

  Maeve stirred in her sleep, murmuring to herself, then lifted her head and stared, semiconscious, at Pitt. "Is it my turn to bail?"

  "Not for another five hours," he lied with a smile. "Go back to sleep."

  Giordino paused from bailing for a moment and stared at Pitt, sickness in his heart from knowing without question that Maeve would soon be torn limb from limb and devoured by the murder machines of the deep. Grimly, he went back to his work, laboring ceaselessly, throwing a thousand and more containerfuls of water over the side.

  God only knew how Giordino could keep going. His back and arms must have been screaming in protest. The steel willpower to endure went far beyond the limits of comprehension. Pitt was stronger than most men, but alongside Giordino, he felt like a child watching an Olympic weight lifter. When Pitt had yielded the container in total exhaustion, Giordino took it up as if he could go on forever. Giordino, he knew, would never accept defeat. The tough, stocky Italian would probably die trying to get a stranglehold on a hammerhead.

  Their peril sharpened Pitt's mind. In a final desperate attempt, he lowered the sail, laid it flat in the water, then slipped it under the hull and tied the lines to the buoyancy tubes. The nylon sheet, pressed against the crack by the pressure of the water, slowed the advance of the leakage by a good fifty percent, but at best it was only a stopgap measure that bought them a few extra hours of life. Unless the sea became perfectly calm, the physical breakdown of the crew and the splitting apart of the boat, Pitt figured, would occur shortly after darkness fell. He glanced at his watch and saw that sunset was only four and a half hours away.

  Pitt gently grabbed Giordino's wrist and removed the container from his hand. "My turn," he said firmly. Giordino did not resist. He nodded in appreciation and fell back against a buoyancy tube, too exhausted to sleep.

  The sail held back the flow of water enough so that Pitt actually stayed even for a short time. He bailed into the afternoon, mechanically, losing all sense of time, barely noting the passage of the brutal sun, never wilting under its punishing rays. He bailed like a robot, not feeling the pain in his back and arms, his senses completely numbed, going on and on as if he were caught in a narcotic stupor.

  Maeve had roused herself out of a state of lethargy. She sat up and peered dully at the horizon behind Pitt 's back. "Don't you think palm trees are pretty," she murmured softly.

  "Yes, very pretty," Pitt agreed, giving her a tight smile, believing her to be hallucinating. "You shouldn't stand under them. People have been killed by falling coconuts."

  "I was in Fiji once," she said, shaking her hair loose. "I saw one drop through the windshield of a parked car."

  To Pitt, Maeve looked like a little girl, lost and wandering aimlessly in a forest, who had given up all hope of ever finding her way home. He wished there was something he could do or say that would comfort her. But there was nothing on God's sea that anyone could do. His sense of compassion and utter inadequacy left him embittered.

  "Don't you think you should steer more to starboard?" she said listlessly.

  "Starboard?"

  She stared as if in a trance. "Yes. You don't want to miss the island by sailing past it."

  Pitt's eyes narrowed. Slowly, he turned and peered over his shoulder. After nearly sixteen days of taking position sightings from the sun and suffering from the glare on the water, his eyes were so strained that he could only focus in the distance for a few seconds before closing them. He cast his eyes briefly across the bow but saw only blue-green swells.

  He turned back. "We can no longer control the boat," he explained softly. "I've taken down the sail and placed it under the hull to slow the leakage."

  "Oh, please," she pleaded. "It's so close. Can't we land and walk around on dry ground if only for a few minutes?"

  She said it so calmly, so rationally in her Australian twang, that Pitt felt his spine tingle. Could she actually be seeing something? Reason dictated that Maeve's mind was playing tricks on her. But a still-glowing spark of hope mixed with desperation made him rise to his knees while clutching a buoyancy tube for stability. At that moment the boat rose on the crest of the next swell and he had a brief view of the horizon.

  But there were no hills with palm trees rising above the sea.

  Pitt circled his arm around Maeve's shoulders. He remembered her as robust and spirited. Now she looked small and frail, and yet her face glowed with an intensity that wasn't there before. Then he saw that she was not staring across the sea but into the sky.

  For the first time he noticed the bird above the boat, wings outspre
ad, hovering in the breeze. He cupped his hands over his eyes and gazed at the winged intruder. The wingspan was about a meter, the feathers a mottled green with specks of brown. The upper beak curled and came to a sharp point. To Pitt the bird appeared to be an ugly cousin of the more colorful parrot family.

  "You see it too," said Maeve excitedly. "A kea, the same one that led my ancestors to Gladiator Island. Sailors shipwrecked in southern waters swear the kea shows the way to safe harbors."

  Giordino peered upward, regarding the parrot more as a meal than a divine messenger sent by ghosts to guide them toward dry land. "Ask Polly to recommend a good restaurant," he muttered wearily.

  "Preferably one that doesn't have fish dishes on the menu."

  Pitt did not reply to Giordino's survivalist humor. He studied the kea's movements. The bird hovered as if resting and made no attempt at aimlessly circling the boat. Then, apparently catching its second breath, it began to wing away in a southeasterly direction. Pitt immediately took a compass bearing on the bird's course, keeping it in sight until it became a speck and disappeared.

  Parrots are not water birds like the gulls and petrels that range far over the seas. Perhaps it was lost, Pitt thought. But that didn't play well. For a bird that preferred to sink its claws on something solid, it made no attempt to land on the only floating object within sight. That meant that it was not tired of flying on instinct toward some unknown mating ground. This bird knew exactly where it was and where it was going. It flew with a plan. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was in the midst of flying from one island to another.

  Pitt was certain it could see something from a higher altitude that the miserable people in the dilapidated boat below could not.

  He moved to the control console and pulled himself to his feet, clutching the stand with both hands to keep from being pitched overboard. Again he squinted through swollen eyes toward the southeast.

  He had become all too familiar with clouds on the horizon that gave the illusion of land rising from the sea. He was too used to seeing white tufts of cotton drifting over the outer edge of the sea, their uneven shapes and dark gray colors raising false hopes before altering form and gliding onward, driven by winds out of the west.