Shock Wave

  Maeve's eyes brightened, and she snapped her fingers as if something deep in her memory had surfaced. "They're called the Tits."

  Pitt and Giordino glanced at each other as if not believing what they had heard. "You did say `tits'?"

  Giordino inquired.

  "An old Australian tale about a pair of islands that look like a woman's breasts. They're said to disappear and reappear, like Brigadoon."

  "I hate to be a debunker of Down Under myths," said Pitt facetiously, "but this rock pile hasn't gone anywhere for the last million years."

  "They're not shaped like any mammary glands I've ever seen," muttered Giordino.

  She gave both men a gouty look. "I only know what I heard, about a pair of legendary islands south of the Tasman Sea."

  Hoisted by Giordino, Pitt climbed aboard the canted hull and crawled through the hatch into the deckhouse. "She's been stripped clean," he called out from the inside. "Everything that wasn't screwed down has been removed. Check the transom and see if she has a name."

  Maeve walked around to the stern and stared up at the faded letters that were barely readable.

  "Dancing Dorothy. Her name was Dancing Dorothy."

  Pitt climbed down from the yacht's cockpit. "A search is in order to locate the supplies taken from the boat. The crew may have left behind articles we can put to use."

  Resuming their exploration, it took little more than half an hour to skirt the entire coast of the tear-shaped little island. Then they worked their way inland. They separated and strung out in a loose line to cover more territory. Maeve was the first to spot an axe half buried in the rotting trunk of a grotesquely shaped tree.

  Giordino pulled it loose and held it up. "This should come in handy."

  "Odd-looking tree," said Pitt, eyeing its trunk. "I wonder what it's called."

  "Tasmanian myrtle," Maeve clarified. "Actually, it's a species of false beech. They can grow as high as sixty meters, but there isn't enough sandy loam here to support their root system, so all the trees we see on the island look like they've been dwarfed."

  They continued to search around carefully. A few minutes later Pitt stumbled onto a small ravine that opened onto a flat ledge on the lee side of the island. Lodged in one side of a rock wall, he spied the head of a brass gaff for landing fish. A few meters beyond, they came to a jumbled stack of logs in the form of a hut, with a boat's mast standing beside it. The structure was about three meters wide by four meters long. The roof of logs intermixed with branches was undamaged by the elements. The unknown builder had raised a sound dwelling.

  Outside the hut was a wealth of abandoned supplies and equipment. A battery and the corroded remains of a radio-telephone, a direction-finding set, a wireless receiver for obtaining weather bulletins and time signals for rating a chronometer, a pile of rusty food cans that had been opened and emptied, an intact teakwood dingy equipped with a small outboard motor and miscellaneous nautical hardware, dishes and eating utensils, a few pots and pans, a propane stove and other various and sundry items from the wrecked boat. Strewn around the stove, still discernible, were bones of fish.

  "The former tenants left a messy campground," said Giordino, kneeling to examine a small gas-driven generator for charging the boat's batteries, which had operated the electronic navigational instruments and radio equipment scattered about the campsite.

  "Maybe they're still in the hut," murmured Maeve.

  Pitt smiled at her. "Why don't you go in and see?"

  She shook her head. "Not me. Entering dark and creepy places is man's work."

  Women are indeed enigmatic creatures, Pitt thought. After all the dangers Maeve had encountered in the past few weeks, she couldn't bring herself to walk into the hut. He bent under the low doorway and stepped inside.

  After being exposed to bright light for days on end, Pitt's eyes took a minute or two to become accustomed to the interior darkness of the hut. Except for the shaft of sun through the doorway, the only illumination came from the light seeping through the cracks between the logs The air was heavy and damp with the musty smell of &l and rotted logs.

  There were no ghosts or phantoms lurking in the shadows, but Pitt did find himself staring into the empty eye sockets of a skull attached to a skeleton.

  It lay on its back in a berth salvaged from the sailboat. Pitt identified the remains as a male from the heavy brow' above the eye sockets. The dead man had lost teeth. All but three were missing. But rather than having been knocked out of their sockets, they appeared to have' fallen out.

  A tattered pair of shorts covered the pelvis, and the bony feet still wore a pair of rubber-soled deck shoes. There was no flesh evident. The tiny creatures that crawled out of the dampness had left a clean set of bones.

  The only indication of the dead man's former appearance was a tuft of red hair that lay beneath the skull. The skeletal hands were crossed above the rib cage and clutched a leather logbook.

  A quick look around the interior of the hut showed that the proprietor had set up housekeeping in an efficient manner, utilizing the fixtures from his stranded boat. The sails from the Dancing Dorothy had been spread across the ceiling to keep out any wind and rain that penetrated the branches laced in the roof. A writing desk held British Admiralty charts, a stack of books on piloting, tide tables, navigation lights, radio signals and a nautical almanac. Nearby there was a standing shelf stuffed with brochures and books filled with technical instructions on how to operate the boat's electronic instruments and mechanical gear. A finely finished mahogany box containing a chronometer and a sextant sat on a small wooden table beside the bunk. Sitting beneath the table was a hind bearing compass and a steering compass that had been mounted on the sailboat. The steering helm was leaning against a small folding dining table, and a pair of binoculars was tied to a spoke.

  Pitt leaned over the skeleton, gently removed the logbook and left the hut.

  "What did you find?" asked Maeve with burning curiosity.

  "Let me guess," said Giordino. "A humongous chest full of pirate treasure."

  Pitt shook his head.' "Not this trip. What I found was the man who sailed the Dancing Dorothy onto the rocks. He never made it off the island."

  "He's dead?" queried Maeve.

  "Since long before you were born."

  Giordino stepped to the doorway and peered inside the hut at the remains. "I wonder how he came to be so far off the beaten track."

  Pitt held up the logbook and opened it. "The answers should be in here."

  Maeve stared at the pages. "Can you make out the writing after all this time?"

  "Yes. The log is well preserved, and the hand wrote boldly." Pitt sat down on a rock and scanned several pages before looking up. "His name was Rodney York, and he was one of twelve yachtsmen entered in a solo nonstop race around the world, beginning in Portsmouth, England, and sponsored by a London newspaper. First prize was twenty thousand pounds. York departed Portsmouth on April the twenty-fourth, 1962."

  "Poor old guy has been lost for thirty-eight years," said Giordino solemnly.

  "On his ninety-seventh day at sea, he was catching a few hours' sleep when the Dancing Dorothy struck" Pitt paused to glance up at Maeve and smile-- "what he calls thèMiseries.' "

  "York must not have studied Australian folklore," said Giordino.

  "He quite obviously made up the name," Maeve said righteously.

  "According to his account," Pitt continued, "York made good time during his passage of the southern Indian Ocean after rounding the Cape of Good Hope. He then took advantage of the Roaring Forties to carry him on a direct course across the Pacific for South America and the Strait of Magellan. He figured he was leading the race when his generator gave out and he lost all contact with the outside world."

  "That explains a lot of things," said Giordino, staring over Pitt's shoulder at the logbook. "Why he was sailing in this part of the sea and why he couldn't send position coordinates for a rescue party. I checked his generator when we came on
site. The two-cycle engine that provides its power is in sad shape. York tried to repair it and failed. I'll give it a try, but I doubt if I can do any better."

  Pitt shrugged. "So much for borrowing York's radio to call for help."

  "What does he write after being marooned?" demanded Maeve.

  "Robinson Crusoe, he was not. He lost most of his food supplies when the yacht struck the rocks and capsized. When the boat was later washed up on shore after the storm, he recovered some canned goods, but they were soon gone. He tried to fish, but caught barely enough to stay alive, even with whatever rock crabs he could find and five or six birds he managed to snare. Eventually, his body functions began to give out. York lasted on this ugly pimple in the ocean for a hundred and thirty-six days. His final entry reads `Can no longer stand or move about. Too weak to do anything but lie here and die. How I wish I could see another sunrise over Falmouth Bay in my native Cornwall. But it is not to be. To whoever finds this log and the letters I've written separately to my wife and three daughters, please see they get them. I ask their forgiveness for the great mental suffering I know I must have caused them. My failure was not from fault so much as bad luck. My hand is too tired to write more. I pray I didn't give up too soon.' "

  "He needn't have worried about being found soon after he died," said Giordino. "Hard to believe he lay here for decades without a curious crew from a passing ship or a scientific party coming ashore to set up some kind of weather data gathering instruments."

  "The dangers of landing amid the breakers and the unfriendly rocks are enough to outweigh any curiosity, scientific or otherwise."

  Tears rolled down Maeve's cheeks as she wept unashamedly. "His poor wife and children must have wondered all these years how he died."

  "York's last land bearing was the beacon on the South East Cape of Tasmania." Pitt stepped back into the hut and reappeared a minute later with an Admiralty chart showing the South Tasman Sea. He laid it flat on the ground and studied it for a few moments before he looked up. "I see why York called these rocks the Miseries," said Pitt. "That's how they're labeled on the Admiralty chart."

  "How far off were your reckonings?" asked Giordino.

  Pitt produced a pair of dividers he'd taken from the desk inside and measured off the approximate position he had calculated with his cross-staff. "I put us roughly 120 kilometers too far to the southwest."

  "Not half bad, considering you didn't have an exact fix on the spot where Dorsett threw us off his yacht."

  "Yes," Pitt admitted modestly, "I can live with that."

  "Where exactly are we?" asked Maeve, now down on her hands and knees, peering at the chart.

  Pitt tapped his finger on a tiny black dot in the middle of a sea of blue. There, that little speck approximately 965 kilometers southwest of Invercargill, New Zealand."

  "It seems so near when you look at it on a map," said Maeve wistfully.

  Giordino pulled off his wristwatch and rubbed the lens clean against his shirt. "Not near enough when you think that no one bothered to drop in on poor Rodney for almost forty years."

  "Look on the bright side," said Pitt with an infectious grin. Pretend you've pumped thirty-eight dollars in quarters into a slot machine in Las Vegas without a win. The law of averages is bound to catch up in the next two quarters."

  "A bad analogy," said Giordino, the perennial killjoy,

  "How so?"

  Giordino looked pensively inside the hut. "Because there is no way we can come up with two quarters."

  "Nine days and counting-" declared Sandecker, gazing at the unshaven men and weary women seated around the table in his hideaway conference room. What was a few days previously a neat and immaculate gathering place for the admiral's closest staff members, now resembled a war room under siege. Photos, nautical charts and hastily drawn illustrations were taped randomly to the teak-paneled walls; the turquoise carpet was littered with scraps of paper and the shipwreck conference table cluttered with coffee cups, notepads scribbled with calculations, a battery of telephones and an ashtray heaped with Sandecker's cigar butts. He was the only one who smoked, and the air-conditioning was turned to the maximum setting to draw off the stench.

  "Time is against us," said Dr. Sanford Adgate Ames. "It is physically impossible to construct a reflector unit and deploy it before the deadline."

  The sound expert and his student staff in Arizona intermingled with Sandecker's NUMA people in Washington as if they were sitting at the same table in the same room.

  The reverse was also true. Sandecker's experts appeared to be sitting amid the student staff in Ames'

  work quarters. Through the technology of video holography, their voices and images were transmitted across the country by photonics, the transference of sound and light by fiber optics. By combining photonics with computer wizardry, time and space limitations disappeared.

  "A valid deduction," Sandecker agreed. "Unless we can utilize an existing reflector."

  Ames removed his blue-tinted bifocals and held them up to the light as he inspected the lenses for specks, Satisfied they were clean, he remounted them on his nose. "According to my calculations, we're going to require a parabolic reflector the size of a baseball diamond or larger, with an air gap between the surfaces to reflect the sound energy. I can't imagine who you can find to manufacture one in the short time before the time window closes."

  Sandecker looked across the table at a tired Rudi Gunn, who stared back through the thick lenses of his glasses, which magnified eyes reddened from lack of sleep. "Any ideas, Rudi?"

  "I've run through every logical possibility," Gunn answered. "Dr. Ames is right, it is out of the question to consider fabricating a reflector in time. Our only prospect is to find an existing one and transport it to Hawaii."

  "You'll have to break it down, ship it in pieces and then put it back together," said Hiram Yaeger, turning from a laptop computer that was linked to his data library on the tenth floor. "No known aircraft can carry some thing of such a large surface area through the air in one piece."

  "If one is shipped from somewhere within the United States, supposing it is found," insisted Ames, "it would have to go by boat."

  "But what kind of ship is large enough to hold a thing that size?" asked Gunn of no one in particular.

  "An oil supertanker or an aircraft carrier," said Sandecker quietly, as if to himself.

  Gunn picked up on the statement immediately. "An aircraft carrier's flight deck is more than large enough to carry and deploy a reflector shield the size Doc Ames has proposed."

  "The speed of our latest nuclear carriers is still classified, but Pentagon leaks indicate they can cut the water at fifty knots. Ample time to make the crossing between San Francisco and Honolulu before the deadline."

  "Seventy-two hours," said Gunn, "from departure to deployment at the site."

  Sandecker stared at a desk calendar with the previous dates crossed out. "That leaves exactly five days to find a reflector, get it to San Francisco and deploy it at the convergence zone."

  "A tight schedule, even if you had a reflector in hand," said Ames steadily.

  "How deep does it have to be rigged?" Yaeger asked Ames' image.

  Almost as if she were cued, a pretty woman in her mid-twenties handed Ames a pocket calculator. He punched a few numbers, rechecked his answer and then looked up. "Allowing for the overlapping convergence zones to meet and surface, you should place the center of the reflector at a depth of 170

  meters."

  "Current is our number one problem," said Gunn. "It'll prove a nightmare trying to keep the reflector in place long enough to bounce the sound waves."

  "Put our best engineers on the problem," ordered Sandecker. "They'll have to design some kind of rigging system to keep the reflector stable."

  "How can we be sure that by refocusing the converging sound waves we can return them on a direct channel back to the source on Gladiator Island?" Yaeger asked Ames.

  Ames impassively twisted th
e ends of the mustache that extended beyond his beard. "If the factors that propagated the original sound wave, such as salinity, water temperature and the sound speed, remain constant, the reflected energy should return to the source along its original path."

  Sandecker turned to Yaeger. "How many people are on Gladiator Island?"

  Yaeger consulted his computer. "The intelligence reports from satellite photos suggest a population of around 650 people, mostly miners."

  "Slave labor imported from China," muttered Gunn.

  "If not kill, won't we injure every living thing on the island?" Sandecker asked Ames.

  Another of Ames' students unhesitantly passed a sheet of paper into the acoustics expert's hands. He scanned it for a moment before looking up. "If our analysis is close to the mark, the overlapping convergence zones from the four separated mining operations scattered throughout the Pacific will drop to an energy factor of twenty-eight percent when they strike Gladiator Island, not enough to maim or cause harm to human or animal."

  "Can you estimate the physical reaction?"

  "Headaches and vertigo along with mild nausea should be the only discomforts."

  "A moot point if we can't set a reflector on site before the convergence," Gunn said, staring at a chart on the wall.

  Sandecker drummed his fingers on the table thoughtfully. "Which puts us back in the starter's gate before the race."

  A woman in her forties, fashionably dressed in a conservative blue suit, stared contemplatively at one of the admiral's paintings, the one illustrating the famous World War II aircraft carrier Enterprise during the battle for Midway. Her name was Molly Faraday, and she was a former analyst with the National Security Agency who had jumped over to NUMA at Sandecker's urging, to be his intelligence agency coordinator. With soft toffee-colored hair and brown eyes, Molly was all class. Her gaze swiveled from the painting to Sandecker and fixed him with a somber look.

  "I think I might have the solution to our problems," she said in a quiet monotone.

  The admiral nodded. "You have the floor, Molly."