Shock Wave (Dirk Pitt 13)

Although Pitt had honed the blades on his Swiss army knife to a razor edge, Giordino still had to grip the handle with both hands and exert a great deal of muscle in slicing through the tough underbelly of the shark. Under Maeve's guidance as a professional marine zoologist, he expertly cut out the liver and made an incision in the stomach, finding a recently eaten dorado and several herring. Then Maeve showed him how to slice the flesh from inside the skin efficiently.

"We should eat the liver now," she advised. "It will begin decaying almost immediately, and it is the most nutritious part of the fish."

"What about the rest of the meat?" asked Giordino, swishing the knife and his hands in the water to remove the slime. "It won't take long to spoil in this heat."

"We've got a whole ocean of salt. Slice the meat into strips. Then string it up around the boat. As it dries, we take the salt that has crystallized on the canopy and rub it into the meat to preserve it."

"I hated liver when I was a kid," said Giordino, somewhat green around the gills at the thought. "I don't think I'm hungry enough to eat it raw."

"Force yourself," said Pitt. "The idea is to keep physically fit while we can. We've proven we can supply our stomachs. Our real problem now is lack of water.

Nightfall brought a strange quiet. A half-moon rose and hung over the sea, leaving a silvery path toward the northern horizon. They heard a bird squawking in the star-streaked sky, but couldn't see it.

The cold temperatures common to the southern latitudes came with the disappearance of the sun and eased their thirst a little, and their minds turned to other things. The swells beat rhythmically against the boat and lulled Maeve into thoughts of a happier time with her children. Giordino imagined himself back in his condominium in Washington, sitting on a couch, an arm draped around a pretty woman, one hand holding a frosty mug of Coors beer and his feet propped on a coffee table as they watched old movies on television.

After resting most of the afternoon, Pitt was wide awake and felt revitalized enough to work out their drift and forecast the weather by observing the shape of the clouds, the height and run of the waves and the color of the sunset. After dusk he studied the stars and attempted to calculate the boat's approximate position on the sea. Using his old compass while locked in the storage compartment during the voyage from Wellington, he noted that the yacht had maintained a southwest heading of two-four-zero degrees for twenty minutes short of thirty hours. He recalled John Merchant saying the yacht could cruise at 120

kilometers an hour. Multiplying the speed and time gave him a rough distance traveled of 3,600

kilometers from the time they left Wellington until they were set adrift. This he estimated would put them somewhere in the middle of the south Tasman Sea, between the lower shores of Tasmania and New Zealand.

The next puzzle to solve was how far were they driven by the storm? This was next to impossible to estimate with even a tiny degree of accuracy. All Pitt knew for certain was that the storm blew out of the northwest. In forty-eight hours it could have carried them a considerable distance to the southeast, far from any sight of land. He knew from experience on other projects that the currents and the prevailing winds in this part of the Indian Ocean moved slightly south of east. If they were drifting somewhere between the fortieth and fiftieth parallels, their drift would carry them into the desolate vastness of the South Pacific, where no ship traveled. The next land fall would be the southern tip of South America, nearly thirteen thousand kilometers away.

He stared up at the Southern Cross, a constellation that was not visible above thirty degrees north latitude, the latitude running across North Africa and the tip of Florida. Described since antiquity, its five bright stars had steered mariners and fliers across the immense reaches of the Pacific since the early voyages of the Polynesians. Millions of square miles of loneliness, dotted only by the islands, which were the tips of great mountains that rose unseen from the ocean floor.

However he figured it, no matter how strong their desire to survive, and despite any good luck they might receive, the odds were overwhelming against their ever setting foot on land again.

Hiram Yaeger swam deep in the blue depths of the sea, the water rushing past in a blur as if he were in a jet aircraft flying through tinted clouds. He swept over the edge of seemingly bottomless chasms, soared through valleys of vast mountain ranges that climbed from the black abyss to the sun-glistened surface. The seascape was eerie and beautiful at the same time. The sensation was the same as flying through the void of deep space.

It was Sunday and he worked alone on the tenth floor of the deserted NUMA building. After nine straight hours of staring steadily at his computer monitor, Yaeger leaned back in his chair and rested his tired eyes. He had finally put the finishing touches on a complex program he had created using image-synthesis algorithms to show the three-dimensional propagation of sound waves through the sea.

With the unique technology of computer graphics, he had entered a world few had traveled before. The computer-generated drama of high-intensity sound traveling through water had taken Yaeger and his entire staff a week to calculate. Using special-purpose hardware and a large database of sound-speed variations throughout the Pacific, they had perfected a photorealistic model that traced the sound rays to where convergence zones would occur throughout the Pacific Ocean.

The underwater images were displayed in extremely rapid sequence to create the illusion of motion in and around actual three-dimensional sound-speed contour maps that had been accumulated over a thirty-year study period from oceanographic data. It was computer imaging taken to its highest art form.

He kept an eye on a series of lights beginning with yellow and advancing through the oranges before ending in deep red. As they blinked on in sequenc

e, they told him how close he was coming to the point where the sound rays would converge. A separate digital readout gave him the latitude and longitude.

The piece de resistance of his imagery was the dynamic convergence-zone display. He could even program the image to raise his viewpoint above the surface of the water and show any ships whose known courses were computed to bisect that particular sector of the ocean at a predictable time.

The red light farthest to his right flashed, and he punched in the program to bring the image out of the water, revealing a surface view of the convergence point. He expected to see empty horizons of water, but the image on the viewing screen was hardly what he'd imagined. A mountainous landmass with vegetation filled the screen. He ran through the entire sequence again, beginning from the four points around the ocean that represented Dorsett Consolidated's island mines. Ten, twenty, thirty times he reran the entire scenario, tracing the sound rays to their ultimate meeting place.

Finally satisfied there was no mistake, Yaeger sagged wearily in his chair and shook his head. "Oh my God," he murmured. "Oh my God."

Admiral Sandecker had to force himself not to work on Sundays. A hyper-workaholic, he ran ten kilometers every morning and performed light workouts after lunch to work off excess energy. Sleeping but four hours a night, he put in long, grueling days that would inflict burnout on most other men. Long divorced, with a daughter living with her husband and three children on the other side of the world in Hong Kong, he was far from lonely. Considered a prime catch by the older single women of Washington, he was inundated by invitations to intimate dinners and parties of the social elite. As much as he enjoyed the company of ladies, NUMA was his love, his passion. The marine science agency took the place of a family. It was spawned by him and bred into a giant institution revered and respected around the world.

Sundays, he cruised along the shores of the Potomac River in an old Navy double-ender whaleboat he had bought surplus and rebuilt. The arched bow brushed aside the murky brown water as he cut the wheel to dodge a piece of driftwood. There was history attached to the little eight-meter vessel.

Sandecker had documented her chronology from the time she was built in 1936 at a small boatyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and then transported to Newport News, Virginia, where she was loaded on board the newly launched aircraft carrier Enterprise. Through the war years and many battles in the South Pacific, she served as Admiral Bull Halsey's personal shore boat. In 1958, when the Enterprise was decommissioned and scrapped, the aging double-ender was left to rot in a storage area behind the New York Shipyard. It was there Sandecker found and bought the worn remains. He then beautifully restored her with loving care until she looked like the day she came out of that boatyard in New Hampshire.

As he listened to the soft chugging from the ancient four-cylinder Buda diesel engine, he reflected on events of the past week and contemplated his actions for the week to follow. His most pressing concern was Arthur Dorsett's greed-inspired acoustic plague, which was devastating the Pacific Ocean. This problem was closely followed by the unanticipated abduction of Pitt and Giordino and their subsequent disappearance. He was deeply troubled that neither dilemma was blessed with even a clue toward a solution.

The members of Congress he had approached had refused his pleas to take drastic measures to stop Arthur Dorsett before his guilt was ironclad. In their minds there simply was not enough evidence to tie him to the mass deaths. Reasoning that was fueled by Dorsett's highly paid lobbyists. Par for the course, thought a frustrated Sandecker. The bureaucrats never acted until it was too late. The only hope left was to persuade the President to take action, but without the support of two or more prominent members of Congress, that was also a lost cause.

A light snow fell over the river, coating the barren trees and winter-dead growth on the ground. His was the only boat in sight on the water that wintry day. The afternoon sky was ice blue and the air sharp and quite cold. Sandecker turned up the collar of a wellworn Navy peacoat, pulled a black stocking cap down over his ears and swung the whaleboat toward the pier along the Maryland shore where he kept it docked. As he approached from upriver, he saw a figure get out of the warm comfort of a four-wheel-drive Jeep and walk across the dock. Even at a distance of five hundred meters he easily recognized the strange hurried gait of Rudi Gunn.

Sandecker slipped the whaleboat across the current and slowed the old Buda diesel to a notch above idle. As he neared the dock, he could see the grim expression on Gunn's bespectacled face. He suppressed a rising chill of dread and dropped the rubber bumpers over the port side of the hull. Then he threw a line to Gunn, who pulled the boat parallel to the dock before tying off the bow and stern to cleats bolted to the gray wood.