Plenty of wreckage and debris had come to the surface. Insulation, packaged stores, and unworn life jackets, anything with buoyancy. He saw no sign of another raft but spotted two people bobbing among the wreckage.
“There,” he said, pointing and grabbing an oar.
The flare only lasted another ten seconds, but Joe had also found a flashlight. He kept it trained on the floating crewmen as Kurt and Captain Winslow rowed the life raft in their direction.
Kurt hauled the first crewman onto the raft. She was a young woman he recognized from the radio room. The second survivor was the boatswain’s mate Kurt had seen on the previous night’s watch. Neither one appeared to be responsive. Two others were found, who Kurt didn’t know by sight.
“Are… they… alive?” Hayley asked through chattering teeth.
“Barely,” the captain said. “They’re all but frozen. Hypothermia doesn’t take long in thirty-eight-degree water. We’ve got to get them warmed up.”
“With what?” Hayley asked.
“Body heat,” Kurt said. “Everybody needs to huddle together. We’re all wet. We’re all going to lose our heat fast if we don’t conserve it.”
The group began to move to the middle of the raft, leaning against one another and pulling a microfiber survival blanket over themselves. All except Kurt and Joe, who were aiming the flashlight around and looking for other survivors.
They pulled in a few empty life jackets and several pieces of cloth and plastic, things that might prove useful at some point, but they found no other survivors. Eventually, they knew there was no more point in looking.
“Better save the battery,” Kurt said.
Joe waited until he and Kurt were safely in the huddle with the others before he shut it off.
“Thirty-nine men and women,” the captain said. “What happened to the sea? What was that? I’ve never seen waves like that. They looked like craters appearing in our path.”
Kurt glanced at Hayley.
“Thero’s weapon did this,” she said grimly. “It distorts gravity.”
“And that gravity affects liquids far more easily than solids,” Kurt added, repeating her earlier statement in a somber tone.
“It’s like a bubble,” she managed. “Highly localized but very powerful. It forces the water to the side, and then, when it passes, the crater, as you called it, collapses on itself.”
“And the water comes crashing back in,” the captain added, showing that he understood.
She nodded. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” the captain said.
“But it is,” she replied. “I helped construct the theory. And the sensor I used must have given away our position somehow. That’s the only explanation. The only way they could find us.”
Kurt tried to comfort her, but he didn’t have the words. Nor, in his most optimistic dreams, did he have any idea how they were going to survive, let alone prevent Thero from fulfilling his venomous threat.
TWENTY-SIX
A twelve-hour time difference separated Washington, D.C., and the small fleet of vessels approaching Antarctica. At eight o’clock, the morning shift took over from the night owls in the NUMA communications room, a large, modern workspace that looked something like an air traffic control center.
From there, NUMA teams and vessels were monitored and tracked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all around the globe. Data and communications were sent and received a variety of different ways, the preferred method becoming encrypted satellite communications. It was the most efficient means, the most secure, and the most reliable. Except when it wasn’t working.
Within five minutes of arriving, Bernadette Conry could tell that this was going to be one of those days when all the technology was more trouble than it was worth.
A ten-year NUMA veteran with short dark hair, light green eyes, and a strong sense of duty, Bernadette Conry wore fashionable glasses, little in the way of jewelry, and was known to be a detail-oriented manager.
Her first order of duty on any shift was to run through the list of ongoing operations with the communications specialists, with an eye toward fixing or avoiding any problems. All week long, an uptick in solar flare activity had made that a difficult task.
After going through a lengthy list of ships and operations teams that had experienced trouble during the night, she wondered how naval commanders had even functioned in the days without satellite tracking and communications.
Thankfully, she noticed that almost all the problems from the previous twelve hours had been cleared up. All except one.
She eased over to a console upon which the designation REGION 15 had been marked. Region 15 included most of the Southern Ocean beneath Australia and what NUMA termed Antarctic Zone 1.
“What’s the story with Orion?” she asked the specialist.
“No data for the last hour,” he replied. “But it’s been up and down like that for the past two days.”
“Are you getting data from Dorado and Gemini?”
The technician tapped away at the keys and received a positive answer. “We lost them for a while too,” he said. “But we have clean links to both ships now.”
That raised the supervisor’s sense of doubt. She reached over and tapped the F5 key on the technician’s computer. It brought up a map, which included the Orion’s last-known position.
“She is a lot farther south than the other ships, but the solar activity has backed off considerably. We should be getting a signal. Have you received any radio calls?”
“They’re on a ‘run silent’ protocol,” the specialist reminded her.
“Who’s on board?”
“Austin and Zavala.”
Ms. Conry sighed. “Those two are bad enough about reporting in to begin with. Who put the run silent order on?”
“Came from Dirk Pitt himself.”
The vast majority of NUMA’s work went off without any type of conflict, at least nothing greater than the usual bureaucratic rigmarole found throughout the world. But right from the beginning, the organization had been willing to tangle with those who were up to no good in one way or another. If a “no contact,” “run silent,” or “monitor and track only” order was in place, it usually meant that a delicate or outright-secret assignment was in the works. That ship or team was not to be disturbed or contacted in any way that might risk alerting other parties to its presence.
Satellite communications gave them a way around that. The bursts could be coded and then sent and received without giving a ship’s position away like radio broadcasts could if they were intercepted. But if the satellites were being interfered with by a solar storm, it left the distant ships, and the supervisors who were supposed to keep track of them, in the dark.
“Anything unusual in their last transmission?”
The specialist shook his head. “All data was normal when the link was broken. There was no sign of trouble. Nor has Orion’s emergency beacon been activated.”
The emergency beacons were automatic, designed to go off when a ship sank even if there was no one around to activate them. But Bernadette Conry recalled at least one instance of a ship going down so fast that the beacon never had a chance to send out a message.
“What’s the weather report?”
“Nothing to write home about,” he said. “Westerly swell, five to six feet. Moderate-sized storm forming about five hundred miles from their last-known position.”
Not bad weather at all, she thought. And it was Austin and Zavala. “Keep an eye out for any change,” she said. “I’m going to let the Director know we’ve lost their telemetry.”