Polar Shift Read online

Minutes later, they were driving along the edge of the harbor. The resort hotels thinned out, and the neighborhood they were passing through became more commercial. Eventually, they came to a concentration of warehouses, shipping company offices and maritime buildings. They passed several containerships, and went by the empty berth formerly occupied by the ocean liner. A guardhouse had been set up near the three vessels they had seen from the hotel.

  Standing outside the structure was a beefy guard who carried a side arm and a rifle. He was smoking a cigarette and talking to a longshoreman. Paul kept the car at the same speed so he wouldn’t attract attention, but he drove slowly enough for Gamay to give the ships a quick but thorough inspection.

  “Any other guards?” Trout said.

  “Only the one, that I could see. There may be more on board.”

  “Maybe not. They wouldn’t want to attract attention by having too many security guys hanging around. This could be a golden opportunity to snoop around.”

  “Yes, but he had a very big gun. How do you propose to get past that?”

  Trout gave Gamay a lopsided grin. “I was thinking that a beautiful woman could provide a, uh, diversion.”

  “Here we go again. Cherchez la femme. The oldest trick in the book. Do you think he’d fall for a ruse like that?”

  “You’re kidding,” Trout said with a chuckle. “We’re talking about a hot-blooded Latin male.”

  “Unfortunately,” Gamay said with a sigh, “I think that you’re right. Okay, I’ll do my Mata Hari impression, but you’re buying dinner.”

  A half hour later, they were back in their hotel room. Paul mixed a couple of cool rum drinks, and they sat on the balcony sipping from their glasses and taking turns watching the ships through binoculars until the sun went down.

  After a dinner sent up by room service, Gamay took a shower, doused herself with perfume and slipped into a low-cut red dress. Beautiful women abound in Rio, but Gamay drew every male eye in the lobby when she and Trout crossed to the hotel entrance.

  The shipping dock had undergone a stark personality change. The trucks, longshoremen and stevedores had left for the day, and the dock area had developed a rank, sinister atmosphere. Unevenly spaced pole lamps cast yellow puddles of light that were diffused by a fog that had moved in from the harbor. A foghorn moaned in the distance.

  Gamay drove past the empty berth formerly occupied by the Polar Adventure and pulled the car over and parked under a lamppost near the guardhouse. She got out of the car, stood in the light and took a swig from a bottle of rum. With noisy fanfare, she raised the hood and poked her head underneath. Then, swearing loudly in Spanish, she kicked the fender, looked around and waved at the guard. Weaving as she walked, she made her way over to the guardhouse.

  The guard was a dark-complexioned, muscular man with an expression of bored suspicion on his flat-featured face. Gamay spoke perfect Spanish, but for the benefit of the guard she slurred her words. She said her stupid car had stalled, and asked him to come take a look. He glanced at the car, which was partially obscured by the shadows, hesitating.

  “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of me with that big gun you’re carrying.”

  She staggered and seemed to fall before she grabbed the guard’s shoulder and gave him a blast of rum-soaked breath. The appeal of a sexy, drunk woman and the veiled insult to his manhood did the trick. He laughed lustily and put his arm around her shoulder. Gamay laughed too, and they made their way back to the car.

  “I think they gypped me and there’s no engine,” she said, placing her hands on her hips.

  She was gambling that he would follow the male instinct to stick his head under the car hood. When he did, Trout stepped out of the shadows, tapped him on the shoulder, then dropped the guard with a powerful right cross. With Gamay’s help, they gagged and tied the dazed guard with towels borrowed from the hotel, took his guns and stuffed him in the backseat of the car.

  Trout put the man’s cap on his head, slipped a flashlight into his windbreaker pocket and tucked the pistol in his belt. “Call in the cavalry if I’m not back in twenty minutes.”

  Gamay hefted the rifle. “Be careful,” she said, giving him a peck on the cheek. “You’re looking at the cavalry.”

  Trout would rather have Gamay at his back than a hundred John Waynes. She was an expert marksman, and anyone caught in her sights would have a short life. He swiftly climbed to the top of the gangway and looked around the deck. The fog that hung over the ship and dampened the deck lights would make him less visible, but it would also provide cover for any guards watching the deck.

  He had seen the photos Austin and Zavala had taken of the ship exhumed by the whirlpool and had a general idea of the layout. He blindly navigated his way through the murk and managed to find the superstructure without slamming face-first into it. He felt his way along the exterior until his groping fingers came to a door. He stepped into a darkened space and flicked on the flashlight he had borrowed from the guard. A companionway led to a deck below.

  Clutching the guard’s pistol in his free hand, he descended the stairs and followed a maze of corridors. At the end of one passageway, he paused and put his ear against a metal door, then tried the handle. The door was unlocked. He opened it and stepped through.

  His footsteps echoed as he slowly made his way to a railing and saw that he was standing on a balcony. He was in a cavernous space that must be the generator room Austin and Zavala had described. He flashed his light around and realized why there was only one man guarding the ships. There was nothing to guard. The room was empty.

  Trout made his way back to the main deck. Austin had talked about a shaft that ran down through the hull from the deck to the water. He finally found it, along with the framework around the rectangular opening. But there was no sign of the cone-shaped structure. The ship seemed to have been stripped clean. He pondered the idea of checking out the control room, but decided that there wasn’t time. Gamay would storm the ship in search of Trout if he didn’t come back when promised. He headed for the gangway.

  The guard had regained consciousness, and Gamay had to threaten him with his gun to quiet him down, but other than that there had been no incident.

  “What did you find?” she said.

  “Nothing. And that’s what’s so interesting. My guess is that the other ships are stripped down too.”

  They dragged the guard from the car and left him in the shadows. He had started struggling against his makeshift bindings. With a little more effort, he would be able to free himself. About a hundred feet from the guardhouse, they tossed his guns into the harbor. There was little chance that he would raise the alarm once he got free. His employers would not be pleased if they learned he had fallen down on the job. He would have enough trouble explaining what happened to his weapons.

  On the drive back to the hotel, Trout described his search of the ship and the surprising results.

  “But why? And what did they do with all that stuff?”

  Trout shook his head, picked up his cell phone and punched out a number from the directory.

  “We’ll let Kurt figure that one out.”

  40

  AUSTIN REACHED INTO HIS desk drawer, extracted a dart from a board game and had his hand poised to throw it at the chart of the Atlantic Ocean pinned to the wall when the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver. It was Paul Trout calling from Rio.

  “Hope I’m not interrupting anything important,” Trout said.

  “Not at all. I was bringing my scientific training to bear on a knotty puzzle. How’s the girl from Ipanema?” Austin said.

  “Gamay is fine. But there’s something strange going on with the transmitter ships. I snuck on board one a few minutes ago. It’s been stripped of its turbines and the electromagnetic antenna. I suspect someone has done a similar housecleaning with the other ships.”

  “Empty?” Austin raced through the possibilities in his mind. “They must have done the housecleaning when the ships were in the M
ississippi boatyard.”

  “We should have figured that something funny was going on. The ships are just sitting there, tied up to the dock. No preparations. Nothing to indicate that they’re going to sea anytime soon. Only one ship has left the dock since we’ve been here, and that was an ocean liner.”

  Austin was deep in thought and only half listening to Trout. “What’s that you said about a liner?”

  “The Polar Adventure. It was tied up next to the transmitter ships, but it left earlier today. Is it important?”

  “Maybe. Joe says a liner left the shipyard in Mississippi about the same time as the transmitters.”

  “Wow! Think this is the same vessel we saw?”

  “It’s possible,” Austin said. “They move the transmitters into the liner. Then, while we’re watching the decoys, the liner sneaks away with the payload in broad daylight.”

  “So much for the navy’s plans to tail the ships with a submarine.”

  “Classic ‘bait and switch’ operation. Damned clever.”

  “How long since the liner left port?”

  “It was gone this morning.”

  Austin did a quick mental computation. “They could be hundreds of miles out to sea by now. That’s a jackrabbit start.”

  “What do you want us to do?”

  “Stay put for now, and keep an eye on the ships in case their owners have another card up their sleeve.”

  Austin clicked off. He was angry with himself for not anticipating that anyone intelligent enough to carry out a polar reversal would do everything possible to throw pursuers off their trail. He turned his attention back to the chart. It was a big ocean. With every passing minute, the liner came closer to losing itself in hundreds of square miles of open sea. He thought about calling the Pentagon with the news from Trout, but he was in no mood to waste his breath debating the assistant defense secretary.

  Sandecker might be more successful, but even he would have to deal with the Pentagon bureaucracy, and there was simply no time. Screw ’em, Austin thought. If the world was going to end, he would rather have the responsibility on his shoulders than those of an anonymous government functionary with an attitude. This was going to be a NUMA deal, through and through.

  Ten minutes later, he was in a NUMA vehicle driving through the quiet streets of Washington. He took the highway to Washington National Airport, where the guard at the gate of a restricted area checked his ID and directed Austin to a hanger in a far corner of the airfield. He could see the glow of lights, and easily made his way to where a Boeing 747 jumbo jet was parked on the tarmac.

  Floodlights set up on stands ringed the huge plane and turned night into day. The plane was surrounded by drums of electrical cable and stacks of aluminum and steel. Workers crawled in and out of the plane like ants on a candy bar.

  Zavala sat under the lofty tail of the plane at a makeshift table assembled from a sheet of plywood and a couple of sawhorses. He was going over blueprints with a man dressed in coveralls. He excused himself when he saw Austin and came over to greet him.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the noise.

  Austin glanced around and was relieved to see a semblance of order in what at first seemed to be total chaos.

  “How long before the bird is ready to fly?” Austin said.

  “We’ve had a few glitches, but all the stuff is here. It’s mostly a matter of fitting everything in and connecting it. Seventy-two hours should do it.”

  “How about tomorrow morning?” Austin said.

  Zavala smiled. “You should get a slot on Comedy Central.”

  “Unfortunately, there’s nothing comic about the news I just received from Paul.” He told Zavala about the missing liner. “Could you assemble the rest of the setup while we’re in the air?”

  Zavala winced. “Possible, but not advisable. It would be like trying to stuff a sausage on the run.”

  “What if there’s no choice but to try?”

  Zavala looked at the hectic activity and scratched his head. “I never could resist a juicy sausage. C’mon while I break the bad news to my right-hand man.”

  The man Zavala had been reviewing blueprints with was Drew Wheeler, an amiable Virginian in his forties who was a NUMA specialist in the logistics of moving big payloads around the world. Austin had worked with Drew on a few projects where heavy equipment was needed in a hurry. Wheeler’s tendency to think things through, as if he were mentally chewing on a plug of tobacco, could drive people who worked with him to distraction. But they soon learned that he had a knack for laying out complex plans in his head so they could be executed seamlessly.

  Austin asked how things were going and got the typical Wheeler response. He cocked an elbow on one hip and squinted at the plane from under his eyebrows like a farmer trying to figure out how to remove a tree trunk from a field. “Well,” he said, pausing before he answered. “Things are going okay.”

  “Are they okay enough to get this plane off the ground tomorrow morning?”

  Wheeler chewed the question over for a moment before he replied. “What time tomorrow morning?”

  “As soon as you can make it.”

  Wheeler nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He ambled back to the plane as if out for a casual walk. Austin wasn’t fooled. “I’ll bet you a bottle of Pancho Villa tequila that Drew’s already figured out how to do this.”

  “I know him well enough to recognize that’s a sucker bet,” Zavala said.

  “A wise decision. Where did you get the plane?”

  “You’d be surprised what you can lease these days if you’ve got deep pockets. It’s the 200F freighter, a modified version of the passenger 747. It’s got a capacity of nearly 250 thousand pounds. The main problem was to get all the hardware you see lying around into the plane without having to crack it open like a can of sardines. We tossed the problem around awhile with Hibbet and Barrett,” Zavala said. “I had it in my mind that we’d have to go with massive generators like the ones we saw on the transmitter ship. But Barrett said it wasn’t necessary. We could use smaller generators, just more of them.”

  “What about the coil?” Austin said.

  “That gave us the biggest headache. I’ll show you what we did.”

  Zavala led the way to the nose of the giant plane. Two people in coveralls were bent over a dishlike structure set up on a platform. Al Hibbet smiled when he saw Austin and Zavala walking in his direction.

  “Hello, Al,” Austin said. “Having fun yet?”

  “The most fun I can remember since I got an electric motor for my Tinkertoy set. Karla has been a big help.”

  The other worker looked up and revealed Karla’s smiling face under a baseball cap. “What the professor means is that I’m a great help holding a screwdriver.”

  “Not at all,” Hibbet said. “Karla may not have a technical background, but she has an instinct for solving problems. She has obviously inherited her grandfather’s genes.”

  “Glad to hear you’re working well together,” Austin said. “Joe said you had a problem with the coil.”

  “That’s right,” Hibbet said. “In the transmitter ships, they dangled the antenna below the ship. We were going to sling it under the fuselage.”

  “Would that be a problem during takeoff?”

  “You hit on the problem. This is the radome for the newly designed antenna. I got the idea from some of the setups I’ve seen on early-warning aircraft. It was Karla’s suggestion to redesign the cone to fit into the dome.”

  “I used to have guppies in my fish tank,” Karla said. “They have a pouch under their chin that gave me the idea.”

  Hibbet whipped a plastic covering off a metal-and-wire construction about twenty feet across. The circular framework that sat in a wooden cradle was shaped like an inverted coolie hat. It was flat on top, with shallow sides coming to a point on the bottom.

  “Ingenious,” Austin said. “It looks like
a squashed-down version of the cone antenna. Will it work as well?”

  “Better, I hope,” Hibbet said.

  “That’s good, because we’ve revised our schedule. We need everything ready to fly out by tomorrow morning. Can you assemble the final stages while we’re in the air?”

  Hibbet pinched his chin. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “It’s not the ideal way to do something this complex. We won’t even have a chance to test the turbines. But we can start going down the punch list as soon as we mount the antenna and dome. We’d better ask Barrett for his opinion.”

  They climbed a gangway into the 747’s vast interior. A line of sixteen squat steel cylinders, spaced evenly apart, ran nearly the entire 230-foot length of the airplane’s cargo space. A network of cables connected the cylinders and snaked off in dozens of different directions. Barrett was kneeling over a cable between two of the cylinders.

  He saw Austin and the others and got up to greet them.

  Austin glanced around at the complex arrangement taking up a good part of the plane’s enormous interior. “Looks like you’ve got enough power capacity to light up the city of New York.”

  “Almost,” Barrett said. “It was a bit of a problem hooking up the power source, but we finally jury-rigged a system that should work okay.”

  “I’m more curious about the dynamos. Where did you get so many at such short notice?”

  “Special order from NUMA,” Zavala said. “They were going to go into some new ships before I borrowed them temporarily.”

  “New power source. New antenna. Is it all going to come together?”

  “I think so,” Barrett said. “That is, I’m ninety-nine percent sure, according to the computer models I’ve done.”

  Austin shook his head. “It’s that one percent that worries me. Can we do it all by tomorrow morning?”

  Barrett chuckled, thinking Austin was joking. Then he noticed the serious expression in Austin’s eyes. “Something going on?’

  Austin relayed Trout’s account of the mysterious liner.

  Barrett slammed his fist into his palm. “I told Tris months ago about my idea of using a single ship to concentrate the transmission. I even gave him the plans for the switch. He said it would take too much time. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised he was lying again.”