Polar Shift nf-6 Read online

"No hurry. Tell us about the Belle's disappearance. As I recall, she was sailing off the mid-Atlantic coast. She sent out an SOS, saying she was in trouble, then she vanished without a trace."

  "That's right. An intensive search was launched within hours. The sea seemed to have swallowed her up. It's been tough on the crew's families not knowing what happened to their loved ones. From a practical point of view, the owners would like to get their legal house in order."

  "Ships have disappeared without a clue going back hundreds of years," Austin said. "It still happens, even with instantaneous and worldwide communication."

  "But the Belle wasn't simply any ship. It was about as close to an unsinkable vessel as possible."

  Austin grinned. "That sounds vaguely familiar."

  Adler raised his finger. "I know. The same thing was said about the Titanic. But the science of shipbuilding has made huge leaps since the Titanic went down. The Belle was an entirely new type of oceangoing cargo vessel. It was built strong enough to withstand the most severe weather. You said that this isn't the first time a well-made vessel vanished. Absolutely right. A cargo ship named the Munchen disappeared in a storm while crossing the Atlantic in 1978. Like the Belle, it radioed an SOS, saying it was in trouble. No one could understand what could have happened to such a modern ship. Twenty-seven crewmen were lost."

  "Tragic. Was any trace of the ship ever found?" Austin asked.

  "Rescue attempts started immediately after the SOS. More than a hundred ships combed the ocean. They found some wreckage, and an empty lifeboat that provided a valuable clue. The boat would have hung by pins on the starboard side more than sixty feet above the waterline. The steel pins attached to the boat were found to be bent from forward to aft."

  Zavala's mechanical mind immediately saw the significance of the damage to the ship. "Easy call," he said. "A violent force at least sixty feet tall knocked the lifeboat off its pins."

  "The Maritime Court said the ship sank when bad weather caused an 'unusual event.' "

  Austin chuckled. "Sounds as if the Maritime Court was dancing around the real conclusion."

  "The mariners who heard the court's findings would agree with you. They were outraged. They knew exactly what sunk the Munchen. Sailors had been talking for years about their encounters with waves eighty or ninety feet tall, but the scientists didn't believe their stories."

  "I've heard the stories about monster waves, but I've never experienced one firsthand."

  "Be thankful, because we wouldn't be having this conversation if you had run into one of these creatures."

  "In a way, I don't blame the Maritime Court for being cautious," Austin said. "Sailors do have a reputation for stretching the truth."

  "I can vouch for that," Zavala said with a wistful smile. "I've been hearing about mermaids for years without seeing one."

  "No doubt the court was leery of headlines about vampire killer waves," Adler said. "According to the conventional scientific wisdom at the time, waves like the ones the mariners reported were theoretically impossible. We scientists had been using a set of mathematical equations, called the Linear Model, which said that a ninety-foot wave occurs only once every ten thousand years."

  "Apparently, after the loss of the Munchen we don't have anything to worry about for the next hundred centuries," Austin said with a wry grin.

  "That was the thinking before the Draupner case."

  "You're talking about the Draupner oil rig off Norway?"

  "You've heard of Draupner?"

  "I worked on North Sea rigs for six years," Austin said. "It would be hard to find anyone on a rig who hadn't heard about the wave that slammed into the Draupner tower."

  "The rig is about one hundred miles out to sea," Adler explained to Zavala. "The North Sea is infamous for its lousy weather, but a real stinker of a storm came in on New Year's Day 1985. The rig was getting battered by thirty- to forty-foot waves. Then they got slammed with a wave that the rig's sensors measured at ninety feet. It still leaves me breathless to think about, it."

  "Sounds like the Draupner wave washed the Linear Model down the drain," Zavala said.

  "It blew the model out of the sea. That wave was more than thirty feet higher than the model would have predicted for the ten-thousand-year wave. A German scientist named Julian Wolfram installed a radar setup on the Draupner platform. Over four years, Wolfram measured every wave that hit the platform. He found twenty-four waves that exceeded the limits of the Linear Model."

  "So the tall tales weren't so tall," Austin said. "Maybe Joe will meet Minnie the Mermaid after all."

  "I don't know if I'd go that far, but Wolfram's research showed that the legends had a basis in fact. When he plotted out the graph, he found that these new waves were steeper, as well as bigger, than ordinary waves. Wolfram's work hit the shipping industry like a, well, like a freak wave. For years, marine architects had used the Linear Model to build ships strong enough to handle a wave of no more than forty feet or so. Weather forecasts had been based on the same flawed premise."

  "From what you're saying, every ship on the sea was vulnerable to being sunk by a killer wave," Zavala said.

  Adler nodded. "It would have meant billions in retrofitting and redesign. The potential for an economic disaster spurred more research. The attention focused on the coast off South Africa where many mariners had encountered freak waves. When scientists plotted ship accidents off the African cape, they found that they lay on a line along the Agulhus current. The big waves seemed to occur primarily when warm currents ran against cold currents. Over a ten-year period in the 1990s, twenty ships were lost in this area."

  "The shipping industry must have breathed a big sigh of relief," Austin said. "All a ship had to do was steer clear of that neighborhood."

  "They learned it wasn't that simple. In 1995, the Queen Elizabeth II encountered a ninety-foot wave in the North Atlantic. In 2001, two tourist cruisers, the Bremen and the Caledonian Star, were slammed by ninety-foot waves far from the current. Both ships survived to tell the tale."

  "That would imply that the Agulhus current isn't the only place these waves occur," Austin said.

  "Correct. There were no opposing currents near these ships. We paired this information with the statistics and came to some unsettling conclusions. More than two hundred supertankers and containerships longer than six hundred feet had been sunk around the world over a twenty-year span. Freak waves seemed to play a major role in these losses."

  "Those are pretty grim statistics."

  "They're horrendous! Because of the serious implications for shipping, we have set out to improve ship design, and to see if forecasting is possible."

  "I wonder if the research project the Trouts are working on has anything to do with these steroid waves," Zavala said.

  "Paul Trout and his wife, Gamay Morgan-Trout, are our NUMA colleagues," Austin explained to the professor. "They're on the NOAA ship Benjamin Franklin, doing a study of ocean eddies in this area."

  Adler pinched his chin in thought. "That's an intriguing suggestion. It's certainly worth looking into. I wouldn't rule anything out at this point."

  "You said something about forecasting these freak waves," Austin said.

  "Shortly after the Bremen and Caledonian Star incidents, the Europeans launched a satellite that scanned the world's oceans. In three weeks' time, the satellites picked out ten waves like the ones that nearly sank the two ships."

  "Has anyone been able to figure out the cause of these killer waves?"

  "Some of us have been working with a principle in quantum mechanics called the Schrodinger equation. It's a bit complicated, but it accounts for the way things can appear and disappear with no apparent reason. 'Vampire wave' is a good name for the phenomena. They suck up energy from other waves and, voila, we have our huge monster. We still don't know what triggers these things in the first place."

  "From what you've said, every ship whose hull is built to withstand seas based on the Linear Model could s
uffer the same fate as the Southern Belle."

  "Oh, it gets better than that, Kurt. Much better."

  "I don't understand."

  "The Southern Belle's designers incorporated the newer data on giant waves into their work. The Belle had a covered forecastle, a double hull and strengthening of the transverse bulkheads to prevent flooding."

  Austin stared at the scientist for a moment. Choosing his words carefully, he said, "That would mean that the ship may have encountered a wave larger than ninety feet."

  Adler gestured toward his computer screen. The image showed a series of wave lines and measurements.

  "There were actually two giant waves, one hundred and one hundred twelve feet high, to be exact. We captured their pictures on satellite."

  Adler had expected his dramatic pronouncement to make an impression, but both men responded with expressions of intense interest rather than the gasps of disbelief that he had expected. Adler knew he had done well in coaxing a favor from Rudi Gunn when Austin turned to his friend and, without missing a beat, calmly announced:

  "Looks like we should have brought our surfboards."

  5

  Big Mountain, Montana

  The old man pushed off from the chairlift and skied with strong skating steps to the top of Black Diamond run. He paused at the brow of the hill, and his cobalt eyes took in the panoramic sweep of sky and mountain. From seven thousand feet, he had an eagle's-eye view of the Flathead Valley and Whitefish Lake. The snowy peaks of Glacier National Park glistened in the east. Stretching out to the north were the jagged teeth of the Canadian Rockies.

  No fog shrouded the bald summit. Not a wisp of cloud marred the luminous blue sky. As the warm sunlight toasted his face, he reflected on the debt he owed the mountains. There was no doubt in his mind. Without the clarity offered by the brooding peaks, he would have gone insane.

  When World War II ended, Europe began to pull itself back together, but his mind was a jungle full of dark murmurings. No matter that he had lent his deadly skills to the cause of the Resistance. He was still a robotic killer. Worse, he had a fatal defect- humanity. Like any fine-tuned machine with a flawed mechanism, in time he would have flown apart.

  He had left the war-ravaged continent for New York, and pushed west until he was thousands of miles from the smoldering European slaughterhouse. He had built a simple log house, cutting and hewing each log with hand tools. The backbreaking labor and the pure air cleansed the shadowed recesses of his memory. The violent nightmares became less frequent. He could sleep without a gun under his pillow and a knife strapped to his thigh.

  With the passage of years, he had evolved from a remorseless, polished killing machine into an aging ski bum. The close-cropped blond hair of his youth had turned to a pewter gray that now grew over his ears. A shaggy mustache matched his wild eyebrows. His pale features had become as weathered as buckskin.

  As he squinted against the sun-sparkled snow, a smile came to his long-jawed face. He was not a religious man. He could not muster enthusiasm for a Maker who would create something as absurd as Man. If he chose a religion, it would be Druidism, because it made as much sense to worship an oak tree as any deity. At the same time, he regarded each trip to the top of the mountain as a spiritual experience.

  This would be the last run of the season. The snow had held late into the spring as it did at higher altitudes, but the light, fluffy champagne power of the winter had given way to wet, heavy corn. Patches of exposed brown earth showed through the thin cover, and the smell of damp earth hung in the air.

  He adjusted his goggles and pushed off with his poles, schussing straight down the North Bowl face to gain speed before initiating his first turn. He always started his day with the same trail, a fast bowl run that wound in between silent snow ghosts-strange, phantasmagoric creatures that formed when cold and fog coated trees with rime. He made the smooth, effortless turns he had learned as a child in Kitzbuhl, Austria.

  At the bottom of the bowl, he shot down Schmidt's Chute and into a glade. Except for the most dedicated skiers and boarders, most people had hung up their skis to work on their boats and fishing gear. It seemed that he was the master of the mountain.

  But as Schroeder broke out of the trees into the open, two skiers emerged from a copse of fir trees.

  They skied a few hundred feet behind him, one on either side of the trail. He moved at the same steady pace, making short radius turns that would give the newcomers room. Instead of passing, they matched him turn for turn, until they were skiing three abreast. A long-dormant mental radar kicked on. Too late. The skiers closed on him like the jaws of a pair of pliers.

  The old man pulled over to the edge of the trail. His escorts skidded to hockey stops in sprays of snow, one above him and the other below. Their muscular physiques pushed tightly against the fabric of their identical, one-piece silver suits. Their faces were hidden by their mirrored goggles. Only their jaws were visible.

  The men stared at him without speaking. They were playing a game of silent intimidation.

  He showed his teeth in an alligator smile. "Mornin'," he said cheerfully in the western accent he had cultivated through the years. "They don't make days better than this."

  The uphill skier said in a slow, Southern drawl, "You're Karl Schroeder, if I'm not mistaken."

  The name he had discarded decades before sounded shockingly alien to his ears, but he held his smile.

  "I'm afraid you are mistaken, friend. My name is Svensen. Arne Svensen."

  Taking his time, the skier planted his ski poles into the snow, removed one glove, reached inside his suit and extracted a PPK Walther pistol. "Let's not play games, Arne. We've authenticated your identity with fingerprints."

  Impossible.

  "I'm afraid you've confused me with someone else."

  The man chuckled. "Don't you remember? We were standing behind you at the bar."

  The old man combed his memory and recalled an incident at the Hell Roaring Saloon, the apres-ski watering hole at the bottom of the mountain. He had been pounding down beers as only an Austrian can. He had come back to his stool from a restroom break and found his half-filled beer mug had vanished. The bar was busy, and he assumed another customer had mistakenly walked off with his drink.

  "The beer mug," he said. "That was you."

  The man nodded. "We watched you for an hour, but it was worth the wait. You left us a full set of fingerprints. We've been on your ass ever since."

  The schuss-schuss of skis came from up-trail.

  "Don't do anything stupid," said the man, glancing uphill. He covered the gun with his gloved hand.

  A moment later, a lone skier flew by in a blur and disappeared down the trail without slowing.

  Schroeder had known that his transformation from cold-blooded warrior to human being would leave him vulnerable. But he had come to believe that his new identity had successfully insulated him from his old life. The gun pointed at his heart was persuasive evidence to the contrary.

  "What do you want?" Schroeder said. He spoke with the world-weariness of a fugitive who had been run to ground.

  "I want you to shut up and do what I say. They tell me you're an ex-soldier, so you know how to follow orders."

  "Some soldier," the other man said with undisguised scorn. "All I see from here is an over-the-hill guy crapping his pants."

  They both laughed.

  Good.

  They knew he had been in the military, but he guessed they didn't know that he had graduated from one of the world's most notorious killing schools. He had kept his martial arts and marksmanship skills honed, and, although he was pushing eighty, constant physical exercise and strenuous outdoor pursuits had maintained a body many men half his age would have envied.

  He remained calm and confident. They would be on his turf, where he knew every tree and boulder.

  "I was a soldier a long time ago. Now I'm just an old man." He lowered his head, hunching his shoulders to project an attitude of sub
mission, and injected a tremor into his deep voice.

  "We know a lot more about you than you think," said the man with a gun. "We know what you eat, where you sleep. We know where you and your mutt live."

  They had been in his house.

  "Where the mutt used to live," said the other man.

  He stared at the man. "You killed my dog? Why?"

  "Your little wiener wouldn't stop yapping. We gave him a pill to shut him up."

  The friendly little female dachshund he had named Schatsky was probably barking because she was glad to see the intruders.

  A coldness seemed to flow into his body. In his mind, he heard his classroom mentor, Professor Heinz. The cherubic psychopath with the kindly blue eyes had been rewarded with a teaching sinecure at the Wevelsburg monastery for his work designing the Nazi death machine.

  In skilled hands, nearly any ordinary object can be a lethal weapon, the professor was saying in his soft-spoken voice. The hard end of this newspaper rolled into a tight coil can be used to break a man's nose and drive the bone splinters into his brain. This fountain pen can penetrate the eye and cause death. This metal wrist-watch band worn across the knuckles is capable of breaking facial bones. This belt makes a wonderful garrote if you can't quickly remove your boot laces …

  Schroeder's grip tightened on the pole handles.

  "I'll do whatever you say," he said. "Maybe we can work this out."

  "Sure," the man said with the flicker of a smile. "First, I want you to ski slowly to the base of the mountain. Follow my dog-loving friend. He's got a gun too. I'll be right behind you. At the end of the run, take your skis off, stick them in the rack and walk to the east parking lot."

  "May I ask where you're taking me?"

  "We're not taking you anywhere. We're delivering you."

  "Think of us like FedEx or UPS," the other man said.

  His companion said, "Nothing personal. Just business. Move it. Nice and easy." He gestured with the gun, then he tucked it back into his suit so he could ski unhindered.

  With the downhill man in the lead and Schroeder in the middle, they skied the trail single file at a moderate speed. Schroeder sized up the man ahead as an aggressive skier whose muscle partly made up for his lack of technical skill. He glanced back at the other man and guessed from his free-form technique that he was the less accomplished skier. Still, they were young and strong, and they were armed.