Ghostboat (21 page)

Frank paused to pour himself more coffee. He was sweating. He almost did not hear Hardy’s gravelly tones. “There
are
two. In fact, there are
ten.”

Frank froze, the cup halfway to his lips.

Hardy scratched at his beard and eyed the officers around the table. “Is that steward still here?”

“More coffee?” asked Byrnes, and signaled the steward standing in the corridor. He stuck his head in, and Hardy touched his sleeve.

“Would you go to the galley? Get me a large butcher knife and all the skewers you can find.”

The steward blinked in surprise and looked to Byrnes for confirmation.

“Go ahead,” said Byrfres, and sat back to survey Hardy with growing suspicion.

Hardy was studying Frank’s globe. Finally he looked up. “Let’s go over some of the points you’ve raised, Commander Frank. I will admit the scientific elements interest me more than the mythical aspects of this business. But then, I have been directly, involved in scientific projects closely related to some of the explanations you have so neatly given us. I have to say I don’t care much for your methods; they’re so damned obvious. You want to excite us, frighten us, and impress us. And in the end, what do you really think you’re going to accomplish?”

Frank’s eyes widened. He could see his own humiliation rippling around the compartment. He opened his mouth.

“I would rather you didn’t answer,” Hardy cut in immediately. “I may have some startling facts of my own to present in this matter, and you may find some of them in direct support of your purpose. I’ll ask that you hear me out.”

Frank sat down. “Go ahead,” he muttered.

“Thank you.” Hardy smiled and stood up. He scratched his beard again, smoothing it down over his open collar while staring at the table full of charts.

“The point you made about legends perpetuating themselves. I hate to be nasty about it, but you are yourself a contributor to that irresponsibility. It is very difficult to talk of the things that go on in the Devil’s Triangle without sounding like the worst sort of crackpot, even if you do your best to dress it up with scientific explanations. But I should like to point out certain factors common to the so-called Bermuda Triangle and the Japanese area and... all the others.”

He picked up Frank’s list and waved it. “First of all, if this business is ever going to be investigated in a thoroughly scientific manner, we have got to differentiate between outright vanishings and more natural disasters such as sinkings, wreckings, piracy, founderings, etc. To do the investigating, a project will have to be created on a Federal level. People will have to collect the records of international navies and air forces, of commercial shipping lines and air carriers, and of maritime insurance agencies. These records, once assembled and examined, may eliminate half of what appears on this list. As for the rest, we might be able to find common circumstances in all of them, leading us to one or another satisfactory explanation. The word ‘satisfactory’ is tricky. I don’t mean satisfactory in the sense that we can all rest easy...”

Frank sat back and relit his pipe, his initial shock and displeasure fading as he began to sense Hardy’s drift

“I mean that we may confirm once and for all that, yes, these disappearances are due to natural phenomena, or unnatural phenomena—that they are due to extraterrestrial kidnapping, or a colossal time warp, or a very large hungry fish.”

That drew a laugh from Roybell, and ripples of it went around the table.

Hardy smiled. “If we could pinpoint to our satisfaction that it is all due to one or another of these utterly fantastic explanations, then we
should.
And
live with it.”

Hardy leaned back against the bulkhead and looked down at the table as he spoke. “Let’s go back to what I call
my
involvement. During the late 1960s, I was connected with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. We were a large team of oceanographers brought together to set up experiments dealing with deep-water ocean storms. My specialty was electromagnetic forces in what we have come to call deep-water eddies. Our concern was to find out how the ocean deeps move—what drives them. We know what moves the surface of the ocean: atmospheric conditions, winds, storms, etc. But the ocean’s surface is a relatively impotent force in comparison to the energy created in the great deeps. We found abundant evidence that the lower layers of ocean move in directions opposite to the surface, and at first glance they seem to be driven by temperature differences. As Commander Frank brought up briefly, in some ocean areas currents of vastly different temperatures meet, collide, or interact. Let’s say, a freezing polar current meets a warm tropical flow. They don’t simply blend and change temperature, as when your half-full cup of hot coffee is suddenly filled with cold water. When these vast movements of ocean meet, they do so as layers sliding over each other, each one carried by the force of millions of tons of moving water. What occurs is a deep-ocean storm, much like an atmospheric storm, a disruption in the even flow of energy. A sizable electromagnetic reaction takes place. Just how powerful it is, we have not yet been able to measure. Nor how far-ranging are its effects—that too is still a mystery.

“What we were looking for in. our project was the answer to a question: What makes weather in the seas? What exactly
are
the undersea forces that are
similar
to atmospheric forces? Where do these undersea storms take place? The major test area, explored by the research ship
Glomar Challenger,
was directly over the Bermuda Triangle. The second project center was to have been in the Ramapo Depth off the coast of Japan. I was to have headed it, and we had built a new deep-submergence vessel, the
Neptune 4000.
Unfortunately, that project was blown. But I think I know the answers we would have received, because if you know anything about science at all, you know that a scientist conducts his business in a manner quite similar to a military court-martial. He designs his experiment around all the known factors leading to a certain unavoidable conclusion. He must be convinced of the outcome before he commits to the project. I was convinced that by testing the currents in the Latitude Thirty area from a submersible, I might be able to prove that what gripped the
Candlefish on
the night of December 11, 1944, was a thoroughly natural phenomenon, the nature of which we simply knew nothing about up to that time.”

“Just a minute,” said Frank. “What happened with the Bermuda Triangle experiment?”

“Well, it never really was a Triangle experiment, per se,” admitted Hardy. “It was a strictly limited research program into deep-water eddies.”

“So the results were inconclusive?”

“Not at all. We proved the existence of eddies. You have to understand the tremendous pressures and forces at work in an eddy. A deep-ocean storm uses and dispels more energy than an electrical thunderstorm, and it lasts more than a hundred times longer. A hurricane that starts this week off the coast of Florida may burn itself out within a month. An eddy might last for years! And the movement, compared to an atmospheric storm, is incredibly slow.”

He waved a hand in the air to indicate the gentle sweep of an undersea storm. “It may seem to inch along, but it is the most relentless force on the face of the earth, backed up by the weight of an entire ocean.”

He stopped for a moment, and the tension in the room subsided.

Frank said quietly, “Your tools are here.”

Hardy turned around. The steward was standing in the doorway, clutching a large butcher knife and a handful of skewers. His eyes were wide open. How long had he been standing there? Hardy thanked him and placed all the kitchen implements on the table. Cassidy leaned over his shoulder to examine what had arrived. Roybell sat back in the vinyl sofa and folded his arms over his chest.

“All right,” Hardy said, “what we are coming round to is the fact that in both of these areas”—he tapped the two circled spots on the globe—”and in most of the others I will point out, we have some of the strongest ocean forces in the world. In both areas we have known evidence of colliding surface currents, and now, thanks to the
Glomar
research, every indication of ongoing underwater eddies as well. Here, off Florida, and off Japan, we have hot surface currents streaming up out of the tropics and colder waters coming down from the polar and subpolar areas. They meet on the surface and they swirl”—he made a swirling motion with his hands—”clockwise. And right here in these two most legendary areas, the swirls make their tightest spiraling turns. For these are geographical areas of extreme temperature variation, centers of hurricanes, whirlpools, oceanic and atmospheric disturbances. And undersea eddies.”

Hardy stopped for a moment to suck the rest of the coffee from his cup. He pulled the globe closer and picked up the red felt marker that Frank had used. “Commander Frank has done twenty percent of the work on this globe. Now, let’s see if we can do the rest. So far, we have two distinct mystery areas. From this point on, let’s refer to them as geomagnetic anomalies. For short—GMA.”

There seemed to be no objection, so Hardy continued, “GMA number one is the original... the Bermuda Triangle.” He lettered a “l” inside the center of the oblong circle off the coast of Florida. “We’re going to call Japan our GMA number four.”

“Why four?” asked Frank.

“Because there are more than two, as I said, and we will pinpoint them clockwise around the globe. Meanwhile, we may notice some immediate similarities between GMA-1 and GMA-4. For instance, both of them lie based on the same latitude: thirty degrees north. Both are oblong blobs tilted at—oh, I’d say forty-five degrees to the right. And both lie just off a continental shelf—to the right of a continent, to be precise. And if you will study your sea charts, I think you will find that both GMAs are centers of swirling currents. In fact, using that as a basis, let’s look for our next GMA.”

Hardy leaned over the charts and appeared to be sniffing around, but Frank was well aware that the old man was planning every word he uttered.

“Ah!” Hardy barked. “Here we are. The northern Pacific, northwest of the Hawaiian Islands... This would be right over the Murray Fracture Zone, another area of extreme temperature variation. In fact, this appears to be where the northern Pacific currents are swept around against themselves by the subarctic currents flowing south. Again we have a GMA based on latitude thirty degrees north, from about one hundred sixty to one hundred forty degrees west longitude. We’ll call this GMA number five.”

Hardy paused. “Notice anything peculiar about this one?”

Byrnes was first. “Yeah. It’s nowhere near a continent.”

“True,” agreed Hardy. “But you’re missing the most important detail.”

“What is it?” cut in Frank.

Hardy took the felt-tip pen and, selecting a longitude and latitude in the center of GMA-5, made a small red dot. “Thirty-four degrees north, one hundred forty-nine degrees west. Recognize that, Mr. Frank?”

Frank shook his head, puzzled.

“That is where the
Candlefish
came
up.”

For a full twenty seconds, the only sound in the wardroom was the gentle press of the air-conditioning. Then Hardy turned the globe again and resumed.

“The next two GMAs do not lie entirely over oceans. GMA-2 in fact falls over the western end of the Mediterranean, covering parts of Morocco, Algeria, and Gibraltar. Again, it is based on latitude thirty degrees north, and lies between ten and zero degrees west longitude. GMA-3 emerges from latitude thirty degrees and is entirely over land, right smack over Pakistan and Afghanistan, between sixty-five and eighty degrees east.”

Hardy drew another neat oblong circle around the two eastern countries; then he stood back and spun the globe slowly, pinpointing each of the five GMAs he had identified.

The officers seemed to lean forward in unison, examining each circled section of the globe as it turned before them.

“They all seem to be the same distance apart,” noted Byrnes.

“That’s true.” Hardy smiled. “About seventy-two degrees from center to center.”

“They’re all in the northern hemisphere,” Frank blurted out. “And there are only five. You said ten.”

“Glad you brought that up. Five are in the northern hemisphere and five in the southern.” He proceeded to draw, very quickly, five more oblongs, one each off the eastern coasts of South America, South Africa, and Australia, plus one in the South Pacific and one in the mid-Indian Ocean.

As he made his circles, Hardy called out the longitudes and latitudes and pertinent details to Frank, who wrote them down and, when Hardy was all finished, passed the notes around. All five lay with their northern tips right on latitude 30° south:

GMA-6
 

East of Brazil, centered over Trindade, around 30° W. longitude, latitude 30° S. in the Brazil
 

Basin, north of the Horse latitudes.

GMA-7

South Africa—-east of the Malagasy Republic and Madagascar, between 50°-80° E., and
 

latitude 30o-40° S. Center of the equatorial currents. Very sparsely traveled ocean.

GMA-8

Middle of the Indian Ocean—north of the Diamantina Fracture Zone, west of Australian