Polar Shift (8 page)

The 275-foot ship was named after one of the early pioneers in nautical archaeology. Throckmorton had proven that archaeological methods could work underwater, spurring a whole era of discovery. The ship was a seagoing workhorse. It was designed with versatility in mind, and its remote sensing equipment could just as easily explore an underwater city as a field of hypothermal ocean vents.

Like most research vessels, the
Throckmorton
was a seagoing platform from which scientists could launch vehicles and probes to carry out their experiments. Sprouting from the fantail and foredeck were the booms and cranes that could be used to deploy the various undersea probes and submersibles the ship carried. Power winches were located on the port and starboard sides.

One of the ship's officers greeted the NUMA men at the top of the gangway.

"Captain Cabral welcomes you aboard the
Throckmorton
and wishes you a pleasant trip."

Austin knew the captain, Tony Cabral, from other NUMA expeditions, and looked forward to seeing him again.

"Please thank the captain, and tell him we're pleased to be sailing under his command."

With the brief formalities over, a crewman escorted them to their comfortable cabins. They dropped off their duffel bags and went to find Adler. At the suggestion of the crewman, they looked for him in the vessel's survey control center.

The center was a spacious semidark room on the main deck. The walls were lined with banks of monitors that served as the eyes and ears for the ship's remote sensing gear. When a probe was launched, the information it gathered was transmitted to the center for analysis. With the ship still in port, the room was deserted except for a man who sat at a table pecking away at a computer keyboard.

"Dr. Adler?" Kurt said.

The man looked up from his keyboard and smiled. "Yes. And you must be the folks from NUMA?"

Austin and Zavala introduced themselves and shook hands with Adler.

The wave scientist was a rumpled, big-boned man who had the physique of a lumberjack and a mop of shaggy, silver hair that looked like Spanish moss growing on an old oak. His upper lip was adorned by a crooked mustache that looked as if it had been pasted on his face as an afterthought. He had a rumbling voice and a grumpy way of talking, as if he had just got up from a nap, but the alert, gray eyes that squinted at them through wire-rimmed glasses sparkled with good humor. He thanked them for coming, and pulled over a couple of chairs.

"You don't know how glad I am to see you gentlemen. I wasn't sure Rudi Gunn would go along with my request to have you on the expedition, Kurt. Getting Joe here is an unexpected bonus. I was probably being a bit persistent. Blame my Quaker background.
Friendly persuasion and all that.
We don't push; we sort of lean on people until they notice us."

The professor would never have to worry about going unnoticed, Austin thought. "No apologies needed," he said. "I'm always up for a sea cruise. I was surprised that you specifically wanted me on board. We've never met."

"But I've heard a lot about you. And I know that NUMA likes to tout its accomplishments without specifically attributing them to the work of your Special Assignments Team."

The team had been the brainchild of Admiral Sandecker, who ran NUMA before Dirk Pitt took over as director. He wanted a group of experts for undersea assignments that sometimes took place outside the realm of government oversight. At the same time, he used the team's more spectacular missions to leverage funds out of Congress."

"You're right. We prefer to minimize our role."

Adler responded with a big-toothed grin. "It's very hard to minimize the discovery of the body of Columbus in an underwater Mayan pyramid.
Or to belittle the prevention of a methane hydrate tsunami off the East Coast."

"Dumb luck," Austin said. "We were only doing some troubleshooting."

Zavala rolled his eyes. "Kurt says that the only problem being a troubleshooter is that trouble sometimes shoots back."

"I'll concede that the Special Assignments Team has taken on some odd missions, but NUMA has dozens of technicians far more capable than I am at search and survey. Why did you ask for me?"

Adler's face grew solemn. "Something very strange is going on in the ocean."

"Nothing new there," Austin said. "The sea is more alien than outer space. We know more about the stars than the planet under our feet."

"I'd be the first to agree with you," Adler said. "It's just that, well, I've got some crazy ideas banging around the inside of my skull."

"Joe and I learned a long time ago that there's a thin line between crazy and rational. We'd like to hear what you have to say."

"I'll run them by you in due time, but I'd prefer to wait until we find the
Southern Belle."

"No hurry. Tell us about the
Belle's
disappearance. As I recall, she was sailing off the mid-Atlantic coast. She sent out an SOS, saying she was in trouble,
then
she vanished without a trace."

"That's right. An intensive search was launched within hours. The sea seemed to have swallowed her up. It's been tough on the crew's families not knowing what happened to their loved ones. From a practical point of view, the owners would like to get their legal house in order."

"Ships have disappeared without a clue going back hundreds of years," Austin said. "It still happens, even with instantaneous and worldwide communication."

"But the
Belle
wasn't simply
any
ship. It was about as close to an unsinkable vessel as possible."

Austin grinned. "That sounds vaguely familiar."

Adler raised his finger. "I know. The same thing was said about the
Titanic.
But the science of shipbuilding has made huge leaps since the
Titanic
went down. The
Belle
was an entirely new type of oceangoing cargo vessel. It was built strong enough to withstand the most severe weather. You said that this isn't the first time a well-made vessel vanished.
Absolutely right.
A cargo ship named the
Munchen
disappeared in a storm while crossing the Atlantic in 1978. Like the
Belle
, it radioed an SOS, saying it was in trouble. No one could understand what could have happened to such a modern ship. Twenty-seven crewmen were lost."

"Tragic. Was any trace of the ship ever found?" Austin asked.

"Rescue attempts started immediately after the SOS. More than a hundred ships combed the ocean. They found some wreckage, and an empty lifeboat that provided a valuable clue. The boat would have hung by pins on the starboard side more than sixty feet above the waterline. The steel pins attached to the boat were found to be bent from forward to aft."

Zavala's mechanical mind immediately saw the significance of the damage to the ship. "Easy call," he said. "A violent force at least sixty feet tall knocked the lifeboat off its pins."

"The Maritime Court said the ship sank when bad weather caused an 'unusual event.' "

Austin chuckled.
"Sounds as if the Maritime Court was dancing around the real conclusion."

"The mariners who heard the court's findings would agree with you. They were outraged. They knew
exactly
what sunk the
Munchen.
Sailors had been talking for years about their encounters with waves eighty or ninety feet tall, but the scientists didn't believe their stories."

"I've heard the stories about monster waves, but I've never experienced one firsthand."

"Be thankful, because we wouldn't be having this conversation if you had run into one of these creatures."

"In a way, I don't blame the Maritime Court for being cautious," Austin said. "Sailors do have a reputation for stretching the truth."

"I can vouch for that," Zavala said with a wistful smile. "I've been hearing about mermaids for years without seeing one."

"No doubt the court was leery of headlines about vampire killer waves," Adler said. "According to the conventional scientific wisdom at the time, waves like the ones the mariners reported were theoretically impossible. We scientists had been using a set of mathematical equations, called the Linear Model, which said that a ninety-foot wave occurs only once every ten thousand years."

"Apparently, after the loss of the
Munchen
we don't have anything to worry about for the next hundred centuries," Austin said with a wry grin.

"That was the thinking before the Draupner case."

"You're talking about the Draupner oil rig off Norway?"

"You've heard of Draupner?"

"I worked on North Sea rigs for six years," Austin said. "It would be hard to find anyone on a rig who hadn't heard about the wave that slammed into the Draupner tower."

"The rig is about one hundred miles out to sea," Adler explained to Zavala. "The North Sea is infamous for its lousy weather, but a real stinker of a storm came in on New Year's Day 1985. The rig was getting battered by thirty- to forty-foot waves. Then they got slammed with a wave that the rig's sensors measured at ninety feet. It still leaves me breathless to think about, it."

"Sounds like the Draupner wave washed the Linear Model down the drain," Zavala said.

"It blew the model out of the sea. That wave was more than thirty
feet
higher
than the model would have predicted for the ten-thousand-year wave. A German scientist named Julian Wolfram installed a radar setup on the Draupner platform. Over four years, Wolfram measured every wave that hit the platform. He found twenty-four waves that exceeded the limits of the Linear Model."

"So the tall tales weren't so tall," Austin said. "Maybe Joe will meet Minnie the Mermaid after all."

"I don't know if I'd go that far, but Wolfram's research showed that the legends had a basis in fact. When he plotted out the graph, he found that these new waves were steeper, as well as bigger, than ordinary waves. Wolfram's work hit the shipping industry like a, well, like a freak wave. For years, marine architects had used the Linear Model to build ships strong enough to handle a wave of no more than forty feet or so. Weather forecasts had been based on the same flawed premise."

"From what you're saying, every ship on the sea was vulnerable to being sunk by a killer wave," Zavala said.

Adler nodded. "It would have meant billions in retrofitting and redesign. The potential for an economic disaster spurred more research. The attention focused on the coast off South Africa where many mariners had encountered freak waves. When scientists plotted ship accidents off the African cape, they found that they lay on a line along the Agulhus current. The big waves seemed to occur primarily when warm currents ran against cold currents. Over a ten-year period in the 1990s, twenty ships were lost in this area."

"The shipping industry must have breathed a big sigh of relief," Austin said. "All a ship had to do was steer clear of that neighborhood."

"They learned it wasn't that simple. In 1995, the
Queen Elizabeth II
encountered a ninety-foot wave in the North Atlantic. In 2001,
two tourist
cruisers,
the
Bremen
and
the
Caledonian Star,
were
slammed by ninety-foot waves far from the current. Both ships survived to tell the tale."

"That would imply that the Agulhus current isn't the only place these waves occur," Austin said.

"Correct. There were no opposing currents near these ships. We paired this information with the statistics and came to some unsettling conclusions. More than two hundred supertankers and containerships longer than six hundred feet had been sunk around the world over a twenty-year span. Freak waves seemed to play a major role in these losses."

"Those are pretty grim statistics."

"They're horrendous! Because of the serious implications for shipping, we have set out to improve ship design, and to see if forecasting is possible."

"I wonder if the research project the Trouts are working on has anything to do with these steroid waves," Zavala said.

"Paul Trout and his wife, Gamay Morgan-Trout, are our NUMA colleagues," Austin explained to the professor. "They're on the NOAA ship
Benjamin Franklin,
doing a study of ocean eddies in this area."

Adler pinched his chin in thought. "That's an intriguing suggestion. It's certainly worth looking into. I wouldn't rule
anything
out at this point."

"You said something about forecasting these freak waves," Austin said.

"Shortly after the
Bremen
and
Caledonian Star
incidents, the Europeans launched a satellite that scanned the world's oceans. In three weeks' time, the satellites picked out ten waves like the ones that nearly sank the two ships."

"Has anyone been able to figure out the cause of these killer waves?"

"Some of us have been working with a principle in quantum mechanics called the Schr
ö
dinger equation. It's a bit complicated, but it accounts for the way things can appear and disappear with no apparent reason. 'Vampire wave' is a good name for the phenomena. They suck up energy from other waves and, voil
à
, we have our huge monster. We still don't know what triggers these things in the first place."