Medusa (NUMA Files 8)

“Have you checked out the canyon where the lab was prospecting for jellyfish?” asked Campbell.

“Yeah. It’s a few hundred yards from the site. I dove down into it a couple hundred feet. The canyon goes down forever. Saw a few blue medusae floating around, but that was it. I could dive deeper, but I’ve heard that the definition of insanity is repeating the same useless action over and over.”

“Come up for air, then,” said Campbell. “We’ll call the Concord and fill Captain Dixon in-Hold on, Joe. Call for you coming through the NUMA net. I’ll put it through.”

After a moment or two, a female voice came over Zavala’s earphones.

“How’s your search going, Joe?”

“Hi, Gamay, nice to hear from you. I’ve picked a piece of the support ship off the bottom, but that’s it. How about you?”

“We may have something,” she said. “We tried to contact Kurt but the call wouldn’t go through, so we tracked you down under the sea. Paul and I came across the coordinates for a place called Trouble Island. It’s about a hundred miles from the lab site. It may be where the crew of the Princess underwent their miraculous cure. Not sure how it relates to the missing lab, but maybe it will help.”

“Give the captain the info,” he said, “and I’ll come up and check things out.”

“We’re on our way back to Washington,” she said. “Call if you need anything at this end.”

Zavala thanked Gamay and Paul, then pointed the nose of the submersible toward the surface and powered the thrusters. A crane was waiting to hoist it from the water onto the deck of the NUMA ship.

Zavala popped the hatch, climbed out, and made his way to the bridge. Captain Campbell was poring over the chart table. He pointed to a speck on a chart of Micronesian waters.

“This is the atoll closest to the position your friends gave me,” Campbell said. “Doesn’t look like much, and, as you can see, it’s within a red rectangle, which means it was searched visually. What do you think?”

Zavala pondered the captain’s question, then said, “I think I need to talk to an expert.”

A few minutes later, he was on the line with the NUMA navigational unit that supplied the agency’s worldwide expeditions with up-to-date navigational information.

“Let me see if I understand,” said the map expert, a soft-voiced young woman named Beth. “You’re looking for a Pacific island that is no longer on the charts and you don’t know if it even existed in the first place.”

Zavala chuckled softly.

“Sorry,” he said. “This must be like looking for a nonexistent needle in a very big haystack.”

“Don’t be discouraged, Joe. I like a challenge.”

“Any chance the island might have been noted on a British Admiralty chart?”

“It depends,” she said. “The Admiralty charts were ahead of their time when it came to accuracy, although the earlier ones were privately produced and had lots of errors. The Admiralty certified some maps that shouldn’t have been.”

“You’re saying that an island could be on some charts but not others?”

“Absolutely! The charts and atlases of the nineteenth century showed more than two hundred islands that never existed.”

“How cou

ld that happen?”

“Many ways. A land-starved mariner might mistake a cloud formation for an island and record its position. Figuring longitude was also a problem. Someone might mark a real island in the wrong place. Con men created phony islands to push get-rich-quick schemes. The next guy in the neighborhood looks at his chart and sees empty sea where an island should be . . . Now, tell me what you know about your phantom island.”

“I know that it was real,” Zavala said. “An American whaling ship stopped there in 1848. But the island is not on any modern map. There’s an atoll fairly close by, though.”

“I’ll start by looking for an 1848 chart or one close to it,” she said. “Next, you’ll want to compare it to Pacific Chart 2683.”

“What is so special about it?”

“It’s the gold standard of Admiralty charts. The British Hydrographic Office knew that the Admiralty maps were getting out of whack. Accurate charts were essential for the Navy and commercial interests. So, in 1875, the Admiralty brought in a chief hydrographer named Captain Frederick Evans to purge the phantom islands from all their charts. He got rid of more than a hundred islands in the Pacific alone. The corrected chart was designated with the number 2683.”

“Then it’s possible that the island never existed?” he asked.