The admiral removed a boat cover from a locker, and Gunn helped him stretch it over the boat’s railings. When they finished and Sandecker stepped onto the dock, neither man had yet spoken. Gunn looked down at the whaleboat.
“If you ever want to sell her, I’ll be the first in line with a checkbook.”
Sandecker looked at him and knew Gunn was hurting inside. “You didn’t drive out here just to admire the boat.”
Gunn stepped to the end of the dock and gazed grimly out over the murky river. “The latest report since Dirk and Al were snatched from the Ocean Angler in Wellington is not good.”
“Let’s have it.”
“Ten hours after Dorsett’s yacht vanished off our satellite cameras—”
“The reconnaissance satellites lost them?” Sandecker interrupted angrily.
“Our military intelligence networks do not exactly consider the Southern Hemisphere a hotbed of hostile activity,” Gunn replied acidly. “Budgets being what they are, no satellites with the ability to photograph the earth in detail are in orbits able to cover the seas south of Australia.”
“I should have considered that,” Sandecker muttered in disappointment. “Please go on.”
“The National Security Agency intercepted a satellite phone call from Arthur Dorsett aboard his yacht to his superintendent of operations on Gladiator Island, a Jack Ferguson. The message said that Dirk, Al and Maeve Fletcher were set adrift in a small, powerless boat in the sea far below the fiftieth parallel, where the Indian Ocean meets the Tasman Sea. The exact position wasn’t given. Dorsett went on to say that he was returning to his private island.”
“He placed his own daughter in a life-threatening situation?” Sandecker muttered, incredulous. “I find that unthinkable. Are you sure the message was interpreted correctly?”
“There is no mistake,” said Gunn.
“That’s cold-blooded murder,” muttered Sandecker. “That means they were cast off on the edge of the Roaring Forties. Gale-force winds sweep those latitudes most of the year.”
“It gets worse,” said Gunn solemnly. “Dorsett left them drifting helplessly in the path of a typhoon.”
“How long ago?”
“They’ve been adrift over forty-eight hours.”
Sandecker shook his head. “If they survived intact, they’d be incredibly difficult to find.”
“More like impossible when you throw in the fact that neither our Navy nor the Aussies’ have any ships or aircraft available for a search.”
“Do you believe that?”
Gunn shook his head. “Not for a minute.”
“What are their chances of being spotted by a passing ship?” asked Sandecker.
“They’re nowhere near any shipping lanes. Except for the rare vessel transporting supplies to a subcontinent research station, the only other ships are occasional whalers. The sea between Australia and Antarctica is a virtual wasteland. Their odds of being picked up are slim.”
There was something tired, defeated about Rudi Gunn. If they were a football team with Sandecker as coach, Pitt as quarterback and Giordino as an offensive tackle, Gunn would be their man high in the booth, analyzing the plays and sending them down to the field. He was indispensable, always spirited; Sandecker was surprised to see him so depressed.
“I take it you don’t give them much chance for survival.”
“Three people on a small raft adrift, besieged by howling winds and towering seas. Should they miraculously survive the typhoon, then comes the onslaught of thirst and hunger. Dirk and Al have come back from the dead on more than one occasion in the past, but I fear that this time the forces of nature have declared war on them.”
“If I know Dirk,” Sandecker said irrefutably, “he’d spit right in the eye of the storm and stay alive if he has to paddle that raft all the way to San Francisco.” He shoved his hands deep in the pockets of his old peacoat. “Alert any NUMA research vessels within five thousand kilometers and send them into the area.”
“If you’ll forgive me for saying so, Admiral, it’s a case of too little, too late.”
“I’ll not stop there.” Sandecker’s eyes blazed with intent. “I’m going to demand that a massive search be launched, or by God I’ll make the Navy and the Air Force wish they never existed.”
Yaeger tracked down Sandecker at the admiral’s favorite restaurant, a little out-of-the-way ale and steak house below Washington, where he was having a somber dinner with Gunn. When the compact Motorola Iridium wireless receiver in his pocket beeped, Sandecker paused, washed down a bite of filet mignon with a glass of wine and answered the call. “This is Sandecker.”
“Hiram Yaeger, Admiral. Sorry to bother you.”
“No need for apologies, Hiram. I know you wouldn’t contact me outside the office if it wasn’t urgent.”
“Is it convenient for you to come to the data center?”
“Too important to tell me over the phone?”
“Yes, sir. Wireless communication has unwanted ears. Without sounding overdramatic, it is critical that I brief you in private.”
“Rudi Gunn and I will be there in half an hour.” Sandecker slipped the phone back into the pocket of his coat and resumed eating.
“Bad news?” asked Gunn.
“If I read between the lines correctly, Hiram has gathered new data on the acoustic plague. He wants to brief us at the data center.”
“I hope the news is good.”
“Not from the tone of his voice,” Sandecker said soberly. “I suspect he discovered something none of us wants to know.”
Yaeger was slouched in his chair, feet stretched out, contemplating the image on an oversized video display computer terminal when Sandecker and Gunn walked into his private office. He turned and greeted them without rising from his chair.
“What do you have for us?” Sandecker asked, not wasting words.
Yaeger straightened and nodded at the video screen. “I’ve arrived at a method for estimating convergence positions for the acoustic energy emanating from Dorsett’s mining operations.”
“Good work, Hiram,” said Gunn, pulling up a chair and staring at the screen. “Have you determined where the next convergence will be?”
Yaeger nodded. “I have, but first, let me explain the process.” He typed in a series of commands and then sat back. “The speed of sound through seawater varies with the temperatures of the sea and the hydrostatic pressure at different depths. The deeper you go and the heavier the column of water above, the faster sound travels. There are a hundred other variables I could go into, dealing with atmospheric conditions, seasonal differences, convergence-zone propagation access and the formation of sound caustics, but I’ll keep it simple and illustrate my findings.”
The image on the viewing screen displayed a chart of the Pacific Ocean, with four green lines, beginning at the locations of the Dorsett mines and intersecting at Seymour Island in the Antarctic. “I began by working backward to the source from the point where the acoustic plague struck. Tackling the hardest nut to crack, Seymour Island, because it actually sits around the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula in the Weddell Sea, which is part of the South Atlantic, I determined that deep ocean sound rays were reflected by the mountainous geology on the seafloor. This was kind of a fluke and didn’t fit the normal pattern. Having established a method, I calculated the occurrence of a more elementary event, the one that killed the crew of the Mentawai.”
“That was off Howland Island, almost dead center in the Pacific Ocean,” commented Sandecker.
“Far simpler to compute than the Seymour convergence,” said Yaeger as he typed in the data that altered the screen to show four blue lines beginning from Kunghit, Gladiator, Easter and the Komandorskie Islands and meeting off Howland Island. Then he added four additional lines in red. “The intersection of convergence zones that wiped out the Russian fishing fleet northeast of Hawaii,” he explained.