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"He needn't have worried about being found soon after he died," said Giordino. "Hard to believe he lay here for decades without a curious crew from a passing ship or a scientific party coming ashore to set up some kind of weather data gathering instruments."
"The dangers of landing amid the breakers and the unfriendly rocks are enough to outweigh any curiosity, scientific or otherwise."
Tears rolled down Maeve's cheeks as she wept unashamedly. "His poor wife and children must have wondered all these years how he died."
"York's last land bearing was the beacon on the South East Cape of Tasmania." Pitt stepped back into the hut and reappeared a minute later with an Admiralty chart showing the South Tasman Sea. He laid it flat on the ground and studied it for a few moments before he looked up. "I see why York called these rocks the Miseries," said Pitt. "That's how they're labeled on the Admiralty chart."
"How far off were your reckonings?" asked Giordino.
Pitt produced a pair of dividers he'd taken from the desk inside and measured off the approximate position he had calculated with his cross-staff. "I put us roughly 120 kilometers too far to the southwest."
"Not half bad, considering you didn't have an exact fix on the spot where Dorsett threw us off his yacht."
"Yes," Pitt admitted modestly, "I can live with that."
"Where exactly are we?" asked Maeve, now down on her hands and knees, peering at the chart.
Pitt tapped his finger on a tiny black dot in the middle of a sea of blue. There, that little speck approximately 965 kilometers southwest of Invercargill, New Zealand."
"It seems so near when you look at it on a map," said Maeve wistfully.
Giordino pulled off his wristwatch and rubbed the lens clean against his shirt. "Not near enough when you think that no one bothered to drop in on poor Rodney for almost forty years."
"Look on the bright side," said Pitt with an infectious grin. Pretend you've pumped thirty-eight dollars in quarters into a slot machine in Las Vegas without a win. The law of averages is bound to catch up in the next two quarters."
"A bad analogy," said Giordino, the perennial killjoy,
"How so?"
Giordino looked pensively inside the hut. "Because there is no way we can come up with two quarters."
"Nine days and counting-" declared Sandecker, gazing at the unshaven men and weary women seated around the table in his hideaway conference room. What was a few days previously a neat and immaculate gathering place for the admiral's closest staff members, now resembled a war room under siege. Photos, nautical charts and hastily drawn illustrations were taped randomly to the teak-paneled walls; the turquoise carpet was littered with scraps of paper and the shipwreck conference table cluttered with coffee cups, notepads scribbled with calculations, a battery of telephones and an ashtray heaped with Sandecker's cigar butts. He was the only one who smoked, and the air-conditioning was turned to the maximum setting to draw off the stench.
"Time is against us," said Dr. Sanford Adgate Ames. "It is physically impossible to construct a reflector unit and deploy it before the deadline."
The sound expert and his student staff in Arizona intermingled with Sandecker's NUMA people in Washington as if they were sitting at the same table in the same room.
The reverse was also true. Sandecker's experts appeared to be sitting amid the student staff in Ames'
work quarters. Through the technology of video holography, their voices and images were transmitted across the country by photonics, the transference of sound and light by fiber optics. By combining photonics with computer wizardry, time and space limitations disappeared.
"A valid deduction," Sandecker agreed. "Unless we can utilize an existing reflector."
Ames removed his blue-tinted bifocals and held them up to the light as he inspected the lenses for specks, Satisfied they were clean, he remounted them on his nose. "According to my calculations, we're going to require a parabolic reflector the size of a baseball diamond or larger, with an air gap between the surfaces to reflect the sound energy. I can't imagine who you can find to manufacture one in the short time before the time window closes."
Sandecker looked across the table at a tired Rudi Gunn, who stared back through the thick lenses of his glasses, which magnified eyes reddened from lack of sleep. "Any ideas, Rudi?"
"I've run through every logical possibility," Gunn answered. "Dr. Ames is right, it is out of the question to consider fabricating a reflector in time. Our only prospect is to find an existing one and transport it to Hawaii."
"You'll have to break it down, ship it in pieces and then put it back together," said Hiram Yaeger, turning from a laptop computer that was linked to his data library on the tenth floor. "No known aircraft can carry some thing of such a large surface area through the air in one piece."
"If one is shipped from somewhere within the United States, supposing it is found," insisted Ames, "it would have to go by boat."
"But what kind of ship is large enough to hold a thing that size?" asked Gunn of no one in particular.
"An oil supertanker or an aircraft carrier," said Sandecker quietly, as if to himself.
Gunn picked up on the statement immediately. "An aircraft carrier's flight deck is more than large enough to carry and deploy a reflector shield the size Doc Ames has proposed."
