Trojan Odyssey (8 page)

“The latter is a possibility, since ships had no reason to sail over the Navidad Bank unless they had a death wish. It might have been part of a cargo of ancient artifacts going to a rich merchant or a museum in Latin America.”

“That's probably as good a guess as any.”

“Not even close, actually,” Max said indifferently. “According to my analysis the encrustation around the exterior is too old for any shipwreck since Columbus sailed the ocean blue. I dated the organic composition in excess of twenty-eight hundred years.”

“That's not possible. There were no shipwrecks in the Western Hemisphere before fifteen hundred.”

Max threw up her hands. “Have you no faith in me?”

“You have to admit that your time scale borders on the ridiculous.”

“Take or leave it. I stand by my findings.”

Yaeger leaned back in his chair, wondering where to take the project and Max's conclusions. “Print up ten copies of your findings, Max. I'll take it from here.”

“Before you send me back to Never-Never Land,” said Max, “there is one more thing.”

Yaeger looked at her guardedly. “Which is?”

“When the glop is cleaned out from the interior of the amphor, you'll find a gold figurine in the shape of a goat.”

“A what?”

“Bye-bye, Hiram.”

Yaeger sat there, totally lost, as Max vanished back into her circuits. His mind ran toward the abstract. He tried to picture an ancient crewman on a three-thousand-year-old ship throwing a bronze pot overboard four thousand miles from Europe but the image would not unfold.

He reached over and picked up the amphor and peered inside, turning away at the awful stench of decaying sea life. He put it back in its box and sat there for a long time, unable to accept what Max had discovered.

He decided to run a check of Max's systems first thing in the morning before sharing the report with Sandecker. He wasn't about to take a chance on Max somehow becoming misguided.

T
HE AVERAGE HURRICANE
takes an average of six days to mature to its full magnitude. Hurricane Lizzie did it in four.

Her winds spiraled at greater and greater speeds. She quickly passed the stage of “Tropical Depression” with wind speeds of thirty-nine miles per hour. Soon as they sustained seventy-four miles an hour, she became a full-fledged, certified, Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Not content to simply become a lower-end tempest, Lizzie soon increased her winds to one hundred and thirty miles an hour, quickly passing Category 2 and charging into a Category 3 system.

In NUMA's Hurricane Center, Heidi Lisherness studied the latest images transmitted down from the geostationary satellites orbiting the earth twenty-two thousand miles above the equator. The data was transmitted into a computer, using one of several numerical models to forecast speed, path and the growing strength of Lizzie. Satellite pictures were not the most accurate. She would have preferred to study more detailed photos, but it was too early to send out a storm-tracking Air Force plane that far into the ocean. She would have to wait before obtaining more detailed images.

Early reports were far from encouraging.

This storm had all the characteristics of crossing the threshold of Category 5, with winds in excess of one hundred and sixty miles an hour. Heidi could only hope and pray that Lizzie would not touch the populated coast of the United States. Only two Category 5 hurricanes held that appalling distinction: the Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 that had charged across the Florida Keys and Hurricane Camille that struck Alabama and Mississippi in 1969, taking down entire twenty-story condominiums.

Heidi took a few minutes to type a fax to her husband, Harley, at the National Weather Service to alert him to the hurricane's latest numbers.

She turned back to the images coming in from the satellites. Looking down on an enlarged image of the hurricane, Heidi never ceased to be impressed with the evil beauty of the thick, spiraling white clouds called the central dense overcast, the cirrus cloud shield that evolves from the thunderstorms in the surrounding walls of the eye. There was nothing up nature's sleeve that could match the horrendous energy of a full-blown hurricane. The eye had formed early, looking like a crater on a white planet. Hurricane eyes could range in size from five miles to over a hundred miles in diameter. Lizzie's eye was fifty miles across.

What gripped Heidi's concentration was the atmospheric pressure as measured in millibars. The lower the reading, the worse the storm. Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and Andrew in 1992 registered 934 and 922, respectively. Lizzie was already at 945 and rapidly dropping, forming a vacuum in her center that was intensifying by the hour. Bit by bit, millibar by foreboding millibar, the atmospheric pressure fell down the barometric scale.

Lizzie was also moving at a record pace westward across the ocean.

Hurricanes move slowly, usually no more than twelve miles an hour, about the average speed of someone riding a bicycle. But Lizzie was not following the rules laid down by those storms that went before her. She was hurtling across the sea at a very respectable twenty miles an hour. And contrary to earlier hurricanes that zigged and zagged their way toward the Western Hemisphere, Lizzie was traveling in a straight line as if her mind was on a specific target.

Quite often, storms spin around and head in a totally different direction. Again, Lizzie wasn't going by the book. If ever a hurricane had a one-track mind, thought Heidi, it was this one.

Heidi never knew who on what island coined the term
hurricane.
But it was a Caribbean word that meant “Big Wind.” Bursting with enough energy to match the largest nuclear bomb, Lizzie was running wild with thunder, lightning and driving rain.

Already, ships in that part of the ocean were feeling her wrath.

 

I
T WAS NOON
now, a crazy, wild, insane noon. The seas had built from a relatively flat surface to thirty-foot waves in what seemed to the captain of the containership, the Nicaraguan-registered
Mona Lisa,
the blink of an eye. He felt as though he'd thrown open a door to the desert and had a tankful of water thrown at him. The seas had gone steep in a matter of minutes and the light breeze had turned into a full-blown gale. In all his years at sea, he'd never seen a storm come up so fast.

There was no nearby port to head toward for shelter, so he steered
Mona Lisa
directly into the teeth of the gale in the calculated gamble that the faster he steamed through the heart of the storm, the better his chances of coming through without damage to his cargo.

Thirty miles north, just over the horizon from the
Mona Lisa,
the Egyptian super oil tanker
Rameses II
found herself overtaken by the surging turbulence. Captain Warren Meade stood in horror as a ninety-foot wave traveling at an incredible speed surged up over his ship's stern, tearing off the railings and sending tons of water smashing through hatches and flooding the crew's quarters and storerooms. The crew in the pilothouse watched dumbstruck as the wave passed around the superstructure and swept over the huge seven-hundred-foot-long deck of the hull whose waterline was sixty feet below, mangling fittings and pipes before it passed over the bow.

An eighty-foot yacht owned by the founder of a computer software company, carrying ten passengers and five crew on a cruise to Dakar, simply vanished, overwhelmed by huge seas without time to send a Mayday.

Before night fell, a dozen other ships would suffer Lizzie's destructive violence.

 

H
EIDI AND FELLOW
meteorologists at the NUMA center began hovering in conferences and studying the data on the latest system sweeping in from the east. They saw no slackening of Lizzie as she swept past longitude 40 west in mid-Atlantic, still throwing all previous predictions out the window by running straight with barely a wobble.

At three o'clock, Heidi took a call from Harley. “How's it looking?” he asked.

“Our ground data processing system is disseminating the data to your center now,” she answered. “Marine advisories began going out last night.”

“What does Lizzie's path look like?”

“Believe it or not, she's running straight as an arrow.”

There was a pause. “That's a new twist.”

“She hasn't deviated as much as ten miles in the last twelve hours.”

Harley was dubious. “That's unheard-of.”

“You'll see when you get our data,” said Heidi firmly. “Lizzie is a record breaker. Ships are already reporting ninety-foot waves.”

“Good lord! What about your computer forecasts?”

“We throw them in the trash as soon as they're printed. Lizzie is not conforming to the modus operandi of her predecessors. Our computers can't project her path and ultimate power with any degree of accuracy.”

“So this is the hundred-year event.”

“I fear this is more like the one that comes every thousand.”

“Can you give me any indication, anything at all, on where she might strike, so my center can began sending out advisories?” Harley's tone became serious.

“She can come ashore anywhere between Cuba and Puerto Rico. At the moment, I'm betting on the Dominican Republic. But there is no way of knowing for certain for another twenty-four hours.”

“Then it's time to issue preliminary alerts and warnings.”

“At the speed Lizzie is traveling it won't be too soon.”

“My weather service coworkers and I will get right on it.”

“Harley.”

“Yes, love.”

“I won't make it home for dinner tonight.”

Heidi's mind could picture Harley's jovial smile over the phone as he replied, “Neither will I, love. Neither will I.”

After she hung up, Heidi sat at her desk for a few moments, staring up at a giant chart of the North Atlantic active hurricane region. As she scanned the Caribbean islands closest to the approaching monster, something tugged at the back of her mind. She typed in a program on her computer that brought up a list depicting the name of the ships, a brief description and their position in a specific area of the North Atlantic. There were over twenty-two in position to suffer the full effects of the storm. Apprehensive that there might be a huge cruise ship with thousands of passengers and crew sailing in the path of the hurricane, she scanned the list. No cruise ships were shown near the worst of the tumult, but one name caught her eye. At first she thought it was a ship, then the old fact dawned on her. It was not a ship.

“Oh lord,” she moaned.

Sam Moore, a bespectacled meteorologist working at a nearby desk, looked up. “Are you all right? Is anything wrong?”

Heidi sagged in her chair. “The
Ocean Wanderer.
”

“Is that a cruise ship?”

Heidi shook her head. “No, it's a floating hotel that's moored directly in the path of the system. There is no way she can be moved in time. She's a sitting duck.”

“That ship that reported a ninety-foot wave,” said Moore. “If one that huge strikes the hotel…” His voice trailed off.

“We've got to warn their management to evacuate the hotel.”

Heidi jumped to her feet and ran toward the communications room, hoping against hope that the hotel management would act without hesitation. If not, over a thousand guests and employees were facing an unspeakable death.

N
EVER HAD SUCH
elegance, such grandeur, risen from the sea. Nothing remotely approaching its unique design and creative distinction had ever been built. The
Ocean Wanderer
underwater resort hotel was an adventure waiting to be experienced, an exciting opportunity for its guests to view the wonders beneath the sea. She rose above the waves in wondrous splendor two miles off the tip of Cabo Cabron peninsula that jutted from the southeastern shore of the Dominican Republic.

Acknowledged by the travel industry as the world's most extraordinary hotel, it was built in Sweden to exacting standards never before achieved. The highest degree of craftsmanship, using the ultimate in materials combined with a daring exploitation of lavish textures that illustrated life in the sea. Wild exuberant greens, blues and golds, all came together to create one lavish ensemble, magnificent outside, breathtaking inside. Above the surface, the outer structure was configured to resemble the soft, graceful lines of a low drifting cloud. Soaring over two hundred feet into the sky, the upper five stories housed the quarters and offices of the four hundred management staff and crew, the expansive storerooms, kitchen galleys, and heating and air-conditioning systems.

Ocean Wanderer
also offered endless upscale gourmet dining options. Five restaurants, run by five world-class chefs. Exotic seafood dishes only minutes fresh from the sea in superb settings. And then there was the sunset catamaran dinner cruise for intimate romance.

Three levels held two lounges featuring celebrity artists and entertainers, an opulent ballroom featuring a full orchestra, and unparalleled shopping with designer boutiques and variety shops filled with exciting and exquisite merchandise rarely found in the guests' malls at home. And it was all duty-free.

There was a movie theater featuring plush seating and satellite feeds of the latest motion pictures. The casino, though smaller in scale, surpassed anything Las Vegas had to offer. Fish swam in contoured aquariums that snaked in and around the gaming tables and slot machines. The glass ceilings also held a variety of sea life that glided lazily above the gambling action below.

The middle levels housed a world-class spa with complimentary professional trainers. A full menu of massages, facials and luxurious body treatments were available, as were saunas and steam rooms decorated like tropical jungle gardens filled with exotic plants and flowers. For the active set, the roof over the spa featured tennis courts and a mini golf course that wound around the deck, with a driving range where guests could drive balls far out into the sea at floating targets spaced at fifty-yard intervals.

For the more adventurous, there were several spectacular water slides with entries at different levels reached by elevators. One wild ride began at the roof of the hotel and spiraled down into the water from fifteen stories above. Other water sports were available that included windsurfing, jetskiing, waterskiing and of course a myriad of free scuba-diving activities directed by certified instructors. Guests could also experience submarine tours in and around the reefs and into the upper reaches of the deeper abyss, as well as a fish's-eye view of the underwater levels of the hotel. Fish identification classes and educational lectures on the sea were given by university teachers of the ocean sciences.

But the magic guests truly experienced was a liquid adventure in the huge pod-shaped structure beneath the surface. Like a man-made iceberg, the
Ocean Wanderer
did not have rooms; it had suites, four hundred and ten of them, all under the surface of the sea, with floor-to-ceiling viewing ports of thick pressurized glass with stunning views of life underwater. Artistic decor in hues of rich blues and greens filled the suites, while selectable colored mood lighting enhanced the feeling that guests were truly living under the sea.

Visually spectacular, guests could come face-to-face with the predators of the sea, the sharks and barracudas, as they moved through the fluid void. Colorful tropical angelfish, parrot fish and friendly dolphins schooled around outside the suites. Giant groupers and manta rays swam through graceful jellyfish as they frolicked amid the vividly colored coral. At night guests could lie in bed and watch the ballet of fish under an array of colored lights.

Unlike the opulent fleet of cruise ships that sailed the seven seas,
Ocean Wanderer
had no engines. It was a floating island moored into position by giant steel pins that were driven deep into the bottom sediment. Stretching from the pins, four heavy cables ran to links that could be automatically coupled or un-coupled.

But it was not a permanent mooring. Mindful of how the wealthy traveler seldom repeats vacations in the same spot, the designers of
Ocean Wanderer
cleverly built mooring facilities in more than a dozen scenic locations around the world. Five times a year, a pair of one-hundred-and-twenty-foot tugboats would rendezvous with the floating hotel. Giant buoyancy tanks were pumped dry, raising the hotel until only two levels remained underwater, the mooring cables were released and the tugs, each mounting three-thousand-horsepower Hun-newell diesel engines, would tow the floating hotel to a new tropical setting, where she would be remoored. Guests could depart for home or stay aboard for the voyage as they chose.

Life raft drills were mandatory for guests and crew alike every four days. Special elevators with their own energy source, in the event all generator power was lost, could evacuate the entire hotel to the deck running around the second level, where the latest state-of-the-art enclosed life rafts were mounted that could maintain buoyancy in extreme sea conditions.

Because of her unique experience and larger-than-life ambience, the
Ocean Wanderer
was booked solid two years in advance.

Today, however, was a special occasion. The man who was the driving force behind the creation of the
Ocean Wanderer
was arriving for a four-day stay for the first time since the floating hotel's lavish opening the month before. A man as mysterious as the sea itself. A man who was photographed only from a distance, and who never revealed lips and chin below the nose while the eyes remained hidden under dark glasses. His nationality was unknown. He was a man with no name, as enigmatic as a specter, Specter being the name given him by the news media. Reporters from newspapers and television news bureaus and stations had failed to penetrate even one layer of his anonymity. His age and history had yet to be revealed. All that was known about him for certain was that he headed and directed Odyssey, a giant scientific research and construction empire with tentacles in thirty countries that made him one of the richest and most powerful men in the civilized world.

There were no stockholders of Odyssey. There were no annual reports or profit-and-loss statements to be examined. The Odyssey empire and the man in control stood alone in cryptic secrecy.

 

A
T FOUR IN
the afternoon the silence of the aquamarine sea and azure sky was shattered by the shriek of an overhead jet aircraft. A large passenger plane painted in the trademark lavender color of Odyssey appeared from the west. Curious hotel guests gazed up at the unusual aircraft as its pilot gently banked the jet around the
Ocean Wanderer
to give his passengers a bird's-eye view of the floating spectacle.

The plane was unlike any they had seen before. The Russian-built Beriev Be-200 was originally designed as an amphibious fire-fighting aircraft. But this one was built to carry eighteen passengers and a crew of four in regal luxury. It was powered by two BMW–Rolls-Royce turbofan engines mounted on the overhead wing. Capable of speeds of over four hundred miles an hour, the rugged craft could easily handle water takeoffs and landings in four-foot seas.

The pilot banked the high-performance amphibian and made his approach in front of the hotel. The big hull kissed the waves in unison with the outer pontoons and settled into the water like an overweight swan. Then it taxied up to a floating dock that extended from the main entrance of the hotel. Mooring lines were thrown and the aircraft was tied alongside the dock by its crew.

A welcoming party led by a bespectacled bald-headed man wearing a crisp blue blazer stood on the dock that was edged with golden velvet cords. Hobson Morton was the executive director of the
Ocean Wanderer.
A fastidious man totally dedicated to his job and employer, Morton stood six feet six inches tall and weighed only one hundred and seventy-five pounds. Morton had been personally lured away by Specter, whose philosophy was to surround himself with men who were smarter than he was. Behind Morton's back, his associates referred to the tall man as “the stick.” Distinguished, with graying temples below a thick mass of neatly brushed blond hair, he stood straight as a light post while a six-man team of attendants exited the aircraft's main hatch, followed by four security men in blue jumpsuits who stationed themselves at strategic locations along the dock.

Several minutes passed before Specter stepped off the plane. In contrast to Morton he might have reached a height of five feet five inches if he had stood up straight, but settled inside a grossly overweight body, standing rigid was an impossibility. As he walked—actually, more of a waddle—he looked like a pregnant bullfrog in search of a swamp. His enormous belly stretched a trademark white tailored suit far beyond its double-threaded limits. His head was swathed in a white silk turban whose lower sash covered his chin and mouth. There was no way to read the face, even the eyes were covered by the impenetrable lenses of heavily coated dark sunglasses. The men and women who were closely associated with Specter could never fathom how he was able to see through them, never knowing that the lenses were like a one-way mirror. The wearer could see perfectly from his side while his eyes remained impenetrable.

Morton stepped forward and formally bowed. “Welcome to the
Ocean Wanderer,
sir.”

There was no shaking of hands. Specter tilted his head back and stared up at the magnificent structure. Though he had taken a personal interest in its design from conception to construction, he had yet to see it fully completed and moored in the sea.

“The appearance exceeds my most optimistic expectations,” Specter said in a soft melodious voice with the barest hint of an American southern accent that did not fit his appearance. When Morton first met Specter he expected him to speak in high-pitched, scratchy sounds.

“I'm sure you will be more than pleased with the interior as well,” said Morton in a patronizing tone. “If you will please follow me, I will give you the grand tour before escorting you to the royal penthouse suite.”

Specter merely nodded in reply, and began trundling across the deck to the hotel with his retinue bringing up the rear.

 

I
N THE COMMUNICATIONS
room across a wide hallway from the executive offices, an operator was monitoring and relaying the satellite calls that were coming in from Specter's main headquarters at his company-built city in Laguna, Brazil, and offices around the world. A light blinked on his console and he answered the call.

“
Ocean Wanderer,
how may I direct your call?”

“This is Heidi Lisherness from the NUMA Hurricane Center in Key West. May I speak to the director of your resort?”

“I'm sorry, but he is busy escorting the owner and founder of
Ocean Wanderer
on a private tour of the hotel.”

“This is extremely urgent. Let me talk to his assistant.”

“Everyone in the executive office is on the tour also.”

“Then will you please,” Heidi pleaded, “please, inform them that a Category Five hurricane is headed in the direction of the
Ocean Wanderer.
It is traveling at incredible speed and could strike the hotel as soon as dawn tomorrow. You must, I repeat, you
must
begin evacuating your hotel. I will give you frequent updates and will stand by at this number for any questions your director may have.”

The operator dutifully jotted down the Hurricane Center's number and then answered several other calls that came in while he was talking with Heidi. Not taking the warning seriously, he waited until he was relieved two hours later before he tracked down Morton and relayed the message.

Morton stared at the message typed out by the operator's voice printer and reread it thoughtfully before handing it to Specter. “A weather warning from Key West. They report that a hurricane is heading in our direction and suggest we evacuate everyone in the hotel.”

Specter scanned the warning message and lumbered to a large view window and gazed toward the east across the sea. The sky was free of clouds and the water surface looked quite calm, the wave crests reaching no more than a foot or two in height. “We'll make no hasty decisions. If the storm follows the usual hurricane track, it should veer north and miss us by hundreds of miles.”

Morton was not so sure. A cautious and conscientious man, he preferred to be safe rather than sorry. “I do not believe, sir, it would be in our best interest to risk the lives of our guests or employees. I respectfully suggest that we instruct everyone to begin evacuation procedures and arrange transportation to a safe haven in the Dominican Republic as soon as possible. We should also alert the tugboats to launch an operation to tow us from the worst of the storm.”