“The Bentley’s as good on the street as it is on the track,” Pitt grinned, gunning the car forward. Both occupants waved as Ramsey stared back.
Loren turned to Pitt and smiled. “I don’t think Mr. Ramsey was too impressed with your maintenance crew.”
Pitt reached over and squeezed his wife’s knee. “What are you talking about? I’ve got the sexiest crew chief on the planet.”
He collected his winner’s trophy at the gate, then rumbled out of the Manassas, Virginia, track grounds. Passing the nearby Civil War battlefield site, he turned onto Interstate 66 and made a beeline toward Washington, D.C. The Sunday afternoon traffic was light, and Pitt was able to cruise at the speed limit.
“I forgot to tell you,” Loren shouted over the roar of the open car, “I got a call from Rudi Gunn while you were on the track. He needs to talk to you about a situation he’s monitoring in the Caribbean.”
“Can it wait until tomorrow?”
“He called from the office, so I told him we’d stop by on the way home.” Loren smiled at her husband, knowing his disinterest was only a bluff.
“If you say so.”
Reaching the suburb of Rosslyn, Pitt turned onto the George Washington Parkway and followed it south along the Potomac. The white marble edifice of the Lincoln Memorial gleamed in the fading sunlight as he turned into the entrance of a towering green glass building. He drove the Bentley past a guard station and parked in an underground garage near a keyed elevator, which they rode to the tenth floor.
They had entered the headquarters of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, the federal department tasked with stewardship of the seas. As NUMA’s Director, Dirk Pitt oversaw a large staff of marine biologists, oceanographers, and geologists who monitored the oceans from a fleet of research ships across the globe. The agency also used ocean buoys, gliding submersibles, and even a small squadron of aircraft, all linked to a sophisticated satellite network, that allowed constant monitoring of weather, sea states, and even oil spills in nearly real-time fashion.
The elevator doors opened onto a high-tech bay that housed the agency’s powerful computer center. A quietly humming IBM Blue Gene supercomputer system was concealed behind a high curved wall that faced Loren and Pitt. Extending across the face of the wall was a massive video display, illuminating a dozen or more color graphics and images.
Two men were engaged at a central control table in front of the video wall. The smaller of the two, a wiry man with horn-rimmed glasses, noticed Loren and Pitt enter and bounded over to greet them.
“Glad you could stop by,” Rudi Gunn said with a smile. An ex — Navy commander who had graduated first in his class from the Naval Academy, he served as Pitt’s Deputy Director. “Any luck at the track?”
“I think I would have made the late W. O. Bentley proud today.” Pitt smiled. “What brings you boys into the office on a Sunday?”
“An environmental concern in the Caribbean. Hiram can tell you more, but there appears to be a pattern of unusual dead zones cropping up south of Cuba.”
The trio stepped over to the control table, where Hiram Yaeger, NUMA’s head of computer resources, sat pecking at a keyboard.
“Afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Pitt,” he said without looking up. “Please grab a seat.”
An ardent nonconformist, Yaeger wore his long hair wrapped in a ponytail and dressed like he had just staggered out of a biker bar. “Sorry to intrude on your weekend, but Rudi and I thought you might want to be aware of something we picked up on satellite imagery.”
He pointed to the top corner of the video wall where a large satellite image of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea dominated the screen. “That’s a standard photographic view. Now we’ll go to a digitally enhanced image.”
A second photo appeared, which overlapped the original with brilliant colors. A bright red band arced across the eastern Gulf Coast shoreline.
“What does the red enhancement indicate?” Loren asked.
“A dead zone, judging by its intensity, off the Mississippi River,” Pitt said.
“That’s right,” Gunn said. “Satellite imagery can detect changes in the light reflection off the ocean’s surface, which provides an indication of the water’s organic content. The seas off the Mississippi River Delta are a textbook dead zone. Rich nutrients in the river from fertilizers and other chemical runoffs create explosive growths of plankton — algae blooms. This in turn depletes the water’s oxygen content, leading to hypoxic conditions that kill all marine life. The area off the Mississippi Delta is a notorious dead zone that’s concerned scientists for many years.”
Loren noted the lingering bands of magenta that discolored the coastal waters from Texas to Alabama. “I had no idea it was so pervasive.”
“The intensity is fairly localized at the delta,” Gunn said, “but you can see the widespread effects.”
“That’s well and good,” Pitt said, “but we’ve known about the Mississippi dead zone for years.”
“Sorry, chief,” Yaeger said. “We’re actually focused a little farther south.”
He pointed to a trio of burgundy blotches that dotted the waters northwest of Jamaica. The patches were spread across an irregular line, extending past the Cayman Islands to near the western tip of Cuba.
Yaeger tapped at his keyboard, zooming in on the area. “What we have is an odd series of dead zones that have cropped up rather suddenly.”
“What does the maroon color signify?” Loren asked. “And why do the spots get darker as they progress to the northwest?”
“It appears to be another burst of phytoplankton growth,” Gunn said, “but much higher in intensity than we saw in the Mississippi Delta. They were fast-forming but may be somewhat temporary in nature.” He nodded at Yaeger, who brought up a series of satellite images.
“This is something of a time-lapse view,” he said, “starting about three months ago.”
The initial photo showed no anomalies. A brightly hued spot appeared in the next image, then two more burgundy patches in the following photos. As each new dead zone appeared, the earlier spots faded slightly.
“There’s some sort of sharp impact that is gradually diluted but is soon followed by another outbreak at a different location. As you can see, there seems to be a pattern from southeast to northwest.”
Pitt eyed the multiple dead zones as they progressed. “What’s odd is that they are far from any landmass. They aren’t the result of pollution from river runoffs.”
“Precisely,” Gunn said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Could someone be dumping pollutants at sea?” Loren asked.
“It’s possible,” Gunn said, “but why would someone go to all these locations? A criminal polluter would likely just dump in one spot.”
“What got our attention were the related fish kills and the apparent progression of the disturbances toward the Gulf of Mexico. We’ve found numerous media reports in Jamaica, the Caymans, and even Cuba, reporting large quantities of dead fish and marine mammals washing ashore miles away from the visible zones. We can’t say for sure there is a connection, but if so, the impact may be much more acute than appears on the images.”
Loren looked back at the view off Louisiana. “The Gulf Coast can hardly afford a new environmental catastrophe on the heels of the BP oil spill.”
“That’s precisely our concern,” Gunn said. “If these dead zones begin sprouting in the Gulf of Mexico at the intensity we’re witnessing here, the results could be devastating.”
Pitt nodded. “We need to find out what’s creating them. What do our hydrographic buoys have to say?”
Yaeger brought up a new screen, showing a global schematic. Hundreds of tiny flashing lights peppered the map, representing NUMA sea buoys deployed around the world. Linked to satellites, the buoys measured water temperature, salinity, and sea states, with the data constantly downloaded to Yaeger’s computer center. He zeroed in on the Caribbean, highlighting a few dozen buoys. None were located near the dead zones.