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"Because algae is the nutrient that feeds the polyps and gives them vibrant colors," Gunn went on, "its loss starves the coral, leaving it white and lifeless, a phenomenon known as bleaching."

  "Which seldom occurs when the waters are cool."

  Gunn looked at Pitt. "Why am I telling you this if you already know it all?"

  "I'm waiting for you to get to the good part."

  "Let me drink my coffee before it gets cold."

  There was a silence. Gunn wasn't really in the mood for coffee, but he sipped away until Pitt became impatient.

  "Okay," Pitt said. "Coral reefs are dying around the world. So what's the second factor in their extinction?"

  Gunn idly stirred his coffee with a plastic spoon. "A new threat, and a critical one, is the sudden abundance of thick, green algae and seaweed that is blanketing the reefs like an out-of-control plague."

  "Hold on. You say the coral is starving because it's spitting out the algae even though it's smothered in the stuff?"

  "The warmer water gives and takes. It acts to destroy the reefs while it aids in the growth of algae that can prevent nutrients and sunlight from reaching the coral. Somewhat like smothering it to death."

  Pitt ran a hand through his black hair. "Hopefully the situation will be corrected when the water turns cooler."

  "Hasn't happened," said Gunn. "Not in the Southern Hemisphere. Nor is a temperature drop in the water predicted in the next decade."

  "You think it's a natural phenomenon or fallout from the greenhouse effect?"

  "A possibility, along with the usual indications of pollution."

  "But you have no solid evidence?" Pitt put to him.

  "Neither I nor our NUMA ocean scientists have all the answers."

  "I never heard of a test tube junkie who didn't have a theory," Pitt grinned.

  Gunn smiled back. "I've never looked at myself in that light."

  "Or those terms."

  "You love to stick it to people, don't you."

  "Only opinionated academics."

  "Well," Gunn began, "King Solomon, I ain't. But since you asked for it. My theory on the proliferation of the algae, as any school child can tell you, is that after generations of dumping untreated sewage, garbage, and toxic chemicals in the oceans, the saturation point has finally been reached. The delicate chemical balance of the seas is irretrievably lost. They're heating up, and we're all, particularly our grandchildren, going to pay a heavy price."

  Pitt had never seen Gunn so solemn. "That bad."

  "I believe we've crossed the point of no return."

  "You're not optimistic for a turnaround?"

  "No," Gunn said sadly. "The disastrous effects of bad water quality have been ignored too long."

  Pitt stared at Gunn, mildly surprised that the second-in-command of NUMA was prey to his own thoughts of doom and gloom. Gunn had painted a dire picture. Pitt did not share Gunn's total pessimism. The oceans might be sick, but they were far from terminal.

  "Loosen up, Rudi," Pitt said cheerfully. "Whatever assignment the Admiral has up his sleeve, he's not about to expect the three of us to sally forth and save the seas of the world."

  Gunn looked at him and made a wan smile. "I never second guess the Admiral."

  If either of them had known or even guessed how wrong they were, they'd have threatened the pilot with great bodily harm if he didn't turn the plane around and fly them directly back to Cairo.

  Their ground time at an oil company airstrip outside of Port Harcourt was short and sweet. Within minutes they were airborne in a helicopter beating out over the Gulf of Guinea. Forty minutes later, the craft was hovering over the Sounder, a NUMA-owned research vessel Pitt and Giordino knew quite well, having directed survey projects aboard her on three different occasions. Built at a cost of eighty million dollars, the 120-meter ship was loaded with the most sophisticated seismic, sonar, and bathymetric systems afloat.

  The pilot swung around the huge crane on the Sounder's stern and settled onto the landing pad aft of the superstructure. Pitt was the first to step down to the deck, followed by Gunn. Giordino, moving like a zombie, brought up the rear, yawning every step of the way. Several crewmen and scientists, who were old friends, met and exchanged greetings with them as the rotor blades spun to a stop and the helicopter was tied down.

  Pitt knew his way about and headed up a ladder to the hatch that led to one of the Sounder's marine laboratories. He passed through the counters piled with chemical apparatus and into a conference and lecture room. For a working research ship, the room was pleasantly furnished like an executive boardroom with a long, mahogany table and comfortably padded leather chairs.

  A black man stood in front of a large, rear projection screen with his back to Pitt. He seemed engrossed in a graphic diagram that imaged on the screen. He was at least twenty years older than Pitt and much taller. Pitt guessed him at slightly over 2 meters tall with the loose-limbed movements of an ex-basketball player written all over him.

  But what caught and locked the eye of Pitt and his two friends was neither the colored graphics on the screen nor the incredibly tall presence of the stranger It was the other figure in the conference room, a short, trim and .yet commanding figure who leaned indifferently with one hand on the table while the other held a huge unlit cigar. The narrow face, the cold, authoritative blue eyes, the flaming but now graying red hair and precisely trimmed beard gave him the image of a retired naval admiral, which, as the blue blazer with the embroidered gold anchors on the breast pocket suggested, was exactly what he was.

  Admiral James Sandecker, the driving force behind NUMA, straightened, smiled his barracuda smile, and stepped forward, his hand extended.

  "Dirk! AI!" The greeting came as if he was surprised by their unexpected visit. "Congratulations on discovering the pharaoh's funeral barge. A beautiful job. Well done." He noticed Gunn and merely nodded. "Rudi, I see you rounded them up without incident."

  "Like lambs to a slaughter," Gunn said with a grim smile.

  Pitt gave Gunn a hard look, then turned to Sandecker. "You pulled us off the Nile in a hell of a hurry. Why?"

  Sandecker feigned a hurt expression. "No hello or glad to see you. No greeting at all for your poor old boss who had to cancel a dinner date with a ravishing, wealthy, Washington socialite and fly 6000 kilometers just to compliment your performance."

  "Why is it your highly dubious blessing fills me with anxiety?"

  Giordino dropped moodily into a chair. "Since we did so good, how about a nice fat raise, a bonus, a quick flight home, and a two-week vacation with pay?"

  Sandecker said with forbearance, "The ticker tape parade down Broadway comes later. After you've taken a leisurely cruise up the Niger River."

  "The Niger?" Giordino muttered moodily. "Not another shipwreck search."

  "No shipwreck."

  "When?" asked Pitt.

  "You start at first light," answered Sandecker.

  "What exactly do you want us to do?"

  Sandecker turned to the towering man at the projection screen. "First things first. Allow me to introduce Dr. Darcy Chapman, chief ocean toxicologist at the Goodwin Marine Science Lab in Laguna Beach."

  "Gentlemen," said Chapman in a deep voice that sounded like it rose out of a well. "A sincere pleasure to meet you. Admiral Sandecker has filled me in on your exploits together. I'm truly impressed."

  "You used to play with the Denver Nuggets," muttered Gunn, bending back at the waist to stare up into Chapman's eyes.

  "Until the knees gave out," Chapman grinned. "Then it was back to school for my doctorate in environmental chemistry."

  Pitt and Gunn shook hands with Chapman. Giordino merely waved wearily from his chair. Sandecker picked up a phone and ordered breakfast from the galley.

  "Might as well get comfortable," he said briskly. "We've got a lot of ground to cover before dawn."

  "You do have a rotten job for us," Pitt said slowly.

  "Of course it's a rotten job," Sandecker said m
atter-of-factly. He nodded at Dr. Chapman, who pressed a button on the screen's remote control. A colored map showing the meandering course of a river appeared on the screen. "The Niger River. Third longest in Africa behind the Nile and Congo. Oddly, it begins in the nation of Guinea, only 300 kilometers from the sea. But it flows northeast and then south for 4200 kilometers before emptying into the Atlantic at its delta on the coast of Nigeria. And somewhere along its course . . . somewhere a highly toxic poison is entering the current and being swept into the ocean. There, it's creating a catastrophic upheaval that is . . . well, incalculable in terms of a potential doomsday."

  Pitt stared at Sandecker, not sure if he heard right. "Doomsday, Admiral? Did I understand you correctly?"

  "I am not talking off the top of my head," Sandecker replied. "The sea off West Africa is dying, and the plague is spreading because of an unknown contaminant. The situation is rapidly developing into a chain reaction with the potential of destroying every single species of marine life."

  "That could lead to a permanent change in the earth's climate," said Gunn.

  "The least of our worries," Sandecker remarked. "The end result is extinction for all life forms on land, and that includes us."

  Gunn murmured accusingly. "Aren't you overstating, your case--"

  "Overstating my case," Sandecker interrupted acidly. "The very words the cretin in Congress handed me when I began sounding the warning, when I pleaded for backing to isolate and solve the problem. They're more concerned with maintaining their precious power base and promising the moon to get reelected. I'm sick to death of their endless, stupid committee hearings. Sick to death of their lack of guts in standing for unpopular issues, and spending the nation into bankruptcy. The two-party system has become a stagnant swamp of fraud and criminal promises. As with communism, the great experiment in democracy is withering from corruption. Who cares a damn if the oceans die? Well, by God, I do. And I'm going to the wall to save them."

  Sandecker's eyes blazed in bitterness, his lips stretched tight by vehemence. Pitt was stunned by the depth of emotion. It was strangely out of character.

  "Hazardous waste is dumped in nearly every river of the world," Pitt said quietly, bringing the discussion back on track. "What's so special about the Niger's pollution?"

  "What's special is that it's creating a phenomenon commonly known as the red tide that is reproducing and spreading on a frightening scale."

  "The charmed water burned away, a still and awful red," Pitt quoted.

  Sandecker flicked a glance at Gunn and then focused on Pitt. "You got the message."

  "But not the connection," Pitt admitted.

  "You men are all divers," said Chapman, "so you probably know that red tide is caused by microscopic creatures called dinoflagellates, tiny organisms that contain a red pigment that gives the water a reddish-brown color when they proliferate and float in mass."

  Chapman pressed a button on the remote control box and continued lecturing as an image of a strange-looking microorganism flashed on the viewing screen. "Red tides have been recorded since ancient times. Moses supposedly turned the Nile to blood. Homer and Cicero also mentioned a red bloom in the sea, as did Darwin during the voyage in the Beagle. Outbreaks in modern times have occurred around the world. The most recent came off the west coast of Mexico after the water turned slimy and noxious. The resulting red tide caused the deaths of literally billions of fish, shellfish, and turtles. Even barnacles were wiped out. Beaches were closed for 200 miles and hundreds of natives and tourists died from eating fish that was contaminated by a species of deadly, toxin-containing dinoflagellates."

  "I've scuba dived in red tides," said Pitt, "and suffered no ill effects."

  "Fortunately you swam through one of the many common, harmless varieties," Chapman explained. "There is, however, a newly discovered mutant species that produces the most lethal biological toxins we've ever known. No sea life lives that comes in the slightest contact with it. A few grams of it if evenly dished out could put every human on the face of the earth in a cemetery."

  "That potent."

  Chapman nodded. "That potent. . ."

  "And if the toxin isn't bad enough," added Sandecker, "the little critters consume themselves in an orgy of marine cannibalism that drastically decreases the oxygen in the water and causes any surviving fish and algae to suffocate."

  "It gets even worse," Chapman carried on. "Seventy percent of all new oxygen is provided by diatoms, the tiny plant forms such as algae that live in the sea. The rest comes from vegetation on land. I see no need to enter into a lengthy discourse on how diatoms in the water or trees in the jungle manufacture oxygen through photosynthesis. You've all had that in elementary school. The smothering toxicity of the dinoflagellates as they cluster and bloom into a red tide kills the diatoms. No diatoms, no oxygen. The tragedy is we take oxygen for granted, never thinking that a slight imbalance of the amount created by plants and what we burn off in carbon dioxide could mean our last gasp.

  "Any possibility they'll eat themselves out of existence?" asked Giordino.

  Chapman shook his head "They make up their losses at a ratio of ten births to one death."

  "Don't the tides eventually subside and disperse?" inquired Gunn. "Or die out completely when cooler water currents come in contact with it?"

  Sandecker nodded. "Unfortunately, we're not looking at normal conditions. The mutant microorganism we're dealing with here seems immune to changing water temperatures."

  "So what you're saying is that there is no hope the red tide off Africa will fade and disappear?"

  "Not if left on its own," Chapman answered. "Like trillions of cloning Frankensteins, the dinoflagellates are reproducing at an astronomical rate. Instead of several thousand in a gallon of water, they've mushroomed to nearly a billion per gallon. An increase never before recorded. At the moment they're unstoppable."

  "Any theory on where the mutant red tide evolved from?" asked Pitt.

  "The instigator behind this new breed of prolific dinoflagellates is unknown. But we believe that a contaminant of some kind is spilling out of the Niger River and mutating the dinoflagellates that thrive in seawater and boosting their reproduction cycle."

  "Like an athlete taking steroids," Giordino said dryly.

  "Or aphrodisiacs," Gunn grinned.

  "Or fertility drugs," threw in Pitt.

  "If this red tide goes unchecked and expands without any deterrent throughout the oceans, covering the surface in one massive blanket of toxic dinoflagellates," Chapman explained, "the world's supply of oxygen will diminish to a level too low to support life."

  Gunn said, "You've written a grim scenario, Dr. Chapman."

  "Horror story might be a more apt description," Pitt said quietly.

  "Can't they be destroyed by chemical applications?" Giordino asked.

  "A pesticide?" stated Chapman. "Conceivably, it could make matters worse. Better to cut it off early at the head."

  "Do you have a time frame for this disaster?" Pitt asked Chapman.

  "Unless the flow of contamination into the sea can be stopped dead within the next four months, it will be too late. By then, the spread will be too enormous to control. It will also be self-sufficient, able to feed off itself, passing on the chemical poison it absorbed from the Niger to its offspring." He paused to press a button on the remote control and a colored graph appeared onscreen. "Computer projections indicate millions will begin dying by slow suffocation within eight months, certainly not more than ten. Young children with small lung capacities will be the first to go, too starved for air to cry, their skin turning blue as they go into irreversible coma. It won't be a pretty picture for those few to die last."

  Giordino looked incredulous. "Almost impossible to accept a dead world that ran out of oxygen."

  Pitt stood and moved closer to the screen, studying the cold numbers that indicated the time left for mankind. Then he turned and stared at Sandecker. "So what this all boils down to is yo
u want AI and Rudi and I to run a compact research vessel up the river and analyze water samples until we hunt down the source of the contamination that's forming the red tide. Then figure a way to turn off the spigot."

  Sandecker nodded. "In the meantime we here at NUMA gill work at developing a substance to neutralize the red tides."

  Pitt walked over and studied a map of the Niger River that was hung on a wall. "And if we don't find the origin in Nigeria?"

  "Then you keep heading upriver until you do."

  "Through the middle of Nigeria, northeast to where the giver separates the nations of Benin and Niger and then into Mali."

  "If that's what it takes," said Sandecker.

  "What is the political situation in these countries?" asked Pitt.

  "I have to admit it's slightly unstable."

  "What do you call `slightly unstable'?" Pitt asked skeptically.

  "Nigeria," Sandecker lectured, "Africa's most populous nation at 120 million, is in the middle of an upheaval. The new democratic government was tossed out by the military last month, the eighth overthrow in only twenty years, not to mention countless unsuccessful bids. The inner countryside is torn by the usual ethnic wars and bad blood between Muslims and Christians. The opposition is assassinating government workers who are accused of corruption and mismanagement "

  "Sounds like a fun place," muttered Giordino. "I can't wait to smell the gunsmoke."

  Sandecker ignored him. "The People's Republic of Benin is under a very tight dictatorship. President Ahmed Tougouri rules by terror. Across the river in Niger, the head of state is propped up by Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, who is after the country's uranium mines. The place is a festering crisis. Rebel guerrillas everywhere. I suggest you steer in the middle of the river when you pass between them."

  "And Mali," Pitt probed.

  "President Tahir is a decent man, but he's chained to General Zateb Kazim who runs a three-member Supreme Military Council that is bleeding the country dry. Kazim is a very nasty customer and quite unusual in that he's a virtual dictator who operates behind the front of an honest government"

  Pitt and Giordino exchanged cynical smiles and wearily shook their heads. . .