As always Juan left all medical decisions to Dr. Huxley. “That’s your call.”
“I will be damned,” Mark said in awe. Eric Stone was leaning over his best friend’s shoulder, the text from the laptop reflecting in his newly required glasses.
All heads turned to the young weapon’s specialist.
He continued to read unaware for a moment until Juan cleared his throat and he looked up. “Oh, sorry.
As you know, what you found out there is a wave-powered generator, but on a scale I can’t believe. As far as I knew this technology was in its infancy, with just a couple machines off the coasts of Portugal and Scotland undergoing sea trials.
“What it does is use the power of the waves bending its joints to push hydraulic rams. These rams, in turn, force oil through a motor using a smoothing accumulator to even the flow. The motor then turns a generator and you’ve got electricity.”
As an engineer Max Hanley was the most impressed. “Damned ingenious,” he said. “How much can these things produce?”
“Each one could power a town of two thousand people. And there are forty of them, so we’re talking some serious juice.”
“What are they for?” Juan asked. “Where’s all that electricity going?”
“That’s what was encrypted.” Mark told him. “Each generator is anchored to the seafloor with retractable cables, which is why George didn’t see them when he did his flyby a couple days ago. When the water’s calm or radar on the guard boats spots an approaching vessel they are lowered about thirty feet. A separate cable feeds the electricity to a series of heaters spaced along the length of the generators.”
“Did you say heaters?” Eddie asked.
“Yup. Someone thinks the water around here is a bit cool and decided to heat it up.”
Cabrillo took another sip of coffee and helped himself to a Danish before Linda polished off the plate.
“Can you tell how long they’ve been in operation?”
“They came online in early 2004.”
“And what’s been the effect?”
“That data isn’t on the computer,” Mark replied. “I’m no oceanographer or anything, but I can’t imagine even this much heat having much of an effect on the entire ocean. I know the waste heat from a nuclear reactor can warm a river a few degrees. But that’s pretty localized.”
Juan leaned back again, drumming his fingers against his jaw. His eyes swam in and out of focus. The senior staff continued to talk around him, throwing out ideas and conjecture, but he heard none of their chatter. In his mind he could see the huge generator stations sawing away on the crests of waves while below them radiant heaters glowed cherry red and warmed the waters flowing northward along the African coast.
“If it weren’t for the gun-toting goons cropping up left and right,” Mark was saying when Juan snapped back to the present, “I’d guess this was an art project by, what’s that guy? You know the one who wraps islands in fabric and built those gates in Central Park. Crisco?”
“Christo,” Max replied absently.
“Mark, you’re a genius.” Cabrillo said.
“What? You think this is some messed-up art project?”
“No. What you said about a river.” Juan glanced around the table. “This isn’t about warming the entire ocean, only one very specific part of it. We’re smack in the middle of the Benguela Current, one of the tightest currents in the world. It runs just like a river with clearly demarked boundaries. And right around here it splits in two. One branch continues northward along the coast while the other veers west to become part of the South Atlantic subtropical gyre. The gyre carries water along South America where it is heated several degrees higher than the current that stuck close to Africa.”
“With you so far,” Mark said.
“The two currents meet up again near the equator and as they mix they act as a buffer zone between Northern Hemisphere currents and those of the Southern.”
“I don’t see the big deal here, Chairman. Sorry.”
“If the two currents are closer in temperature when they come together their buffering ability is going to be diminished, possibly enough to overcome the Coriolis effect that drives the prevailing winds and thus these shallow currents.”
Eddie Seng paused from taking a sip of coffee to say, his face alight in comprehension, “This could alter the very direction of the ocean’s currents altogether.”
“Exactly. The earth’s rotation determines prevailing wind direction, which is why hurricanes in the north rotate counterclockwise and cyclones in the south move in a clockwise direction. It’s also the reason the warm gulfstream current that runs along the east coast of the United States moves north and then eastward so that Europe enjoys the weather it does. By rights most of Europe shouldn’t be habitable.
Scotland is more northerly than the Canadian Arctic, for God’s sake.”
“So what happens if southern water flows past the equator near Africa?” Linda asked.
“It’s going to enter the breeding grounds of Atlantic hurricanes,” Eric Stone, who acted as theOregon ’s unofficial meteorologist, replied. “The warmer waters mean more evaporation and more evaporation means stronger storms. A tropical depression needs a surface temperature above eighty degrees to gain enough strength to become a hurricane. Once it has that, it absorbs around two billion tons of water a day.”
“Two billiontons ?” Linda exclaimed.
“And when they hit land they drop anywhere between ten and twenty billion tons a day. What causes the variation between a category one storm and a massive category five is the amount of time they spend sucking up water off the African coast.”
Mark Murphy, usually the smartest person in the room, brightened as he finally understood. “With the Benguela being artificially heated and some of that water escaping north the storms can intensify much faster.”
“And there can be more of them,” Juan concluded. “Anyone thinking what I am?”
“That the severe storms the U.S. has experienced in the past couple of years have been given a little help.”
“Hurricane experts all agree that we’re entering a natural cycle of increased storm intensity,” Eric said, countering Murph’s point.
“That doesn’t mean the generators and heaters aren’t amplifying the cycle,” Mark shot back.
“Gentlemen,” Juan said soothingly, “it is up to better minds than ours to figure out the effects of those things. For now it’s enough they’re turned off. After this meeting I’ll call Overholt and lay out what we’ve found. He’ll more than likely turn it over to NUMA and it will be their problem. Murph, have the computer ready so I can send him all the files.”
“No prob.”
“For right now,” Juan continued, “I want us to concentrate on rescuing Geoffrey Merrick. Then we can think about going after whoever installed the generators in the first place.”
“Do you think there’s a connection?” Max asked from the opposite end of the long table.
“Not at first. But now I’m convinced. The guy Sloane and I chased with the lifeboat intentionally killed himself rather than risk me getting my hands on him. He wasn’t trying to avoid an African jail. He was a fanatic willing to martyr himself so we didn’t discover the heaters. And we know Merrick’s kidnapping isn’t about ransom, its political—i.e., he’s pissed off somebody bad enough to snatch him.”
“Environmentalists,” Linda stated flatly.
“Has to be,” Juan said. “We’ve stumbled into a two-pronged attack of some kind. On the one side they want Merrick, for some reason, and on the other they’re trying to disrupt ocean currents with those big generators.”