"That soon."
Yaeger looked at the admiral, a polar-cold expression on his face. "I was saving the worst till last." His fingers played over the keyboard. "Gentlemen, I give you February twenty-second and a catastrophe of staggering magnitude."
They were not prepared for what flashed on the screen. What Sandecker and Gunn saw on the video screen was an unthinkable event they had no control over, an encircling web of disaster that they could see no way to stop. They stared in sick fascination at the four purple lines that met and crossed on the screen.
"There can be no mistake?" asked Gunn.
"I've run my calculations over thirty times," said Yaeger wearily, "trying to find a flaw, an error, a variable that will prove me wrong. No matter how I shake and bake it, the result always comes out the same."
"God, no," whispered Sandecker. "Not there, not of all places in the middle of a vast and empty ocean."
"Unless some unpredictable upheaval of nature alters the sea and atmosphere," said Yaeger quietly,
"the convergence zones will intersect approximately fifteen kilometers off the city of Honolulu."
This President, unlike his predecessor, made decisions quickly and firmly without vacillating. He refused to take part in advisory meetings that took forever and accomplished little or nothing, and he particularly disliked aides running around lamenting or cheering the latest presidential polls. Conferences to build defenses against criticism from the media or the public failed to shake him. He was set on accomplishing as much as possible in four years. If he failed, then no amount of rhetoric, no sugarcoated excuses or casting the blame on the opposing party would win him another election. Party hacks tore their hair and pleaded with him to present a more receptive image, but he ignored them and went about the business of governing in the nation's interest without giving a second thought to whose toes he stepped on.
Sandecker's request to see the President hadn't impressed White House Chief of Staff Wilbur Hutton.
He was quite impervious to such requests from anyone who wasn't one of the party leaders of Congress or the Vice President. Even members of the President's own cabinet had difficulty in arranging a face-to-face meeting. Hutton pursued his job as Executive Office gatekeeper overzealously.
Hutton was not a man who was easily intimidated. He was as big and beefy as a Saturday night arena wrestler. He kept his thinning blond hair carefully trimmed in a crewcut. With a head and face like an egg dyed red, he stared from limpid smoke-blue eyes that were always fixed ahead and never darted from side to side. A graduate of Arizona State with a doctorate in economics from Stanford, he was known to be quite testy and abrupt with anyone who bragged of coming from an Ivy League school.
Unlike many White House aides, he held members of the Pentagon in great respect. Having enlisted and served as an infantryman in the Army and with an enviable record of heroism during the Gulf War, he had a fondness for the military. Generals and admirals consistently received more courteous recognition than dark-suited politicians.
"Jim, it's always good to see you." He greeted Sandecker warmly despite the fact that the admiral showed up unannounced. "Your request to see the President sounded urgent, but I'm afraid he has a full schedule. You needn't have made a special trip for nothing."
Sandecker smiled, then turned serious. "My mission is too delicate to explain over the phone, Will.
There is no time to go through channels. The fewer people who know about the danger, the better."
Hutton motioned Sandecker to a chair as he walked over and closed the door to his office. "Forgive me for sounding cold and heartless, but I hear that story with frequent regularity."
"Here's one you haven't heard. Sixteen days from now every man, woman and child in the city of Honolulu and on most of the island of Oahu will be dead."
Sandecker felt Hutton's eyes delving into the back of his head. "Oh, come now, Jim. What is this all about?"
"My scientists and data analysts at NUMA have cracked the mystery behind the menace that's killing people and devastating the sea life in the Pacific Ocean."
Sandecker opened his briefcase and
laid a folder on Hutton's desk. "Here is a report on our findings.
We call it the acoustic plague because the deaths are caused by high-intensity sound rays that are concentrated by refraction. This extraordinary energy then propagates through the sea until it converges and surfaces, killing anyone and anything within a radius up to ninety kilometers."
Hutton said nothing for a few moments, wondering for a brief instant if the admiral had slipped off the deep end, but only for an instant. He had known Sandecker too long not to take him as a serious, no-nonsense man dedicated to his job. He opened the cover of the report and scanned the contents while the admiral sat patiently. At last he looked up.
"Your people are sure of this%"
"Absolutely," Sandecker said flatly.
"There is always the possibility of a mistake."'
"No mistake," Sandecker said firmly. "My only concession is a less than five percent chance the convergence could take place a safe distance away from the island."
"I hear through the congressional grapevine that you've approached Senators Raymond and Ybarra on this matter but were unable to get their backing for a military strike against Dorsett Consolidated property."
"I failed to convince them of the seriousness of the situation."