Austin laughed ruefully. His arm muscles were still sore from rescuing Paul Trout and he was dog-tired. "I think there's more buckle than swash in the team these days. We could really use your expertise."
"I'll be glad to help in any way I can," Hibbet said.
Austin gave Hibbet directions to the boathouse, and said he looked forward to seeing him in the morning. He made some notes in a yellow legal pad while the thoughts were fresh in his head. Then he prepared a full pot of Kenyan coffee, put the coffeemaker on automatic and went upstairs to his turret bedroom. He undressed, slid between the cool sheets and quickly fell asleep. It seemed only minutes before he was awakened by the bright morning sunlight streaming into his bedroom window.
He showered and shaved, got dressed comfortably in T-shirt and shorts, and whipped together an order of scrambled eggs and Virginia ham, which he ate on the deck. He had just finished clearing away the dishes when Zavala knocked on the door. The Trouts showed up a few minutes later with Professor Adler. Al Hibbet arrived at the same time. Hibbet was a tall, thin man with a shock of white hair. He was almost painfully shy, and his skin was as pale as marble, both consequences of spending most of his days in a laboratory away from human contact and sunlight.
Austin handed each person a mug of coffee and herded them to a round, teakwood table on the deck. Austin could have called the meeting at his office in the green-tinted tower in Arlington that was the center of NUMA's operations. But he wasn't ready to answer questions or share his thoughts with anyone outside his innermost circle until he had gathered more facts. He pulled up a chair and gazed longingly at the sun-sparkled river where he usually spent his morning rowing for exercise, then glanced around the table and thanked everyone for coming. He felt like Van Helsing calling together a strategy meeting to battle Dracula, and was tempted to ask if anyone brought the garlic.
Instead, he got right to the point. "Something very odd has been going on in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans," he began. "The sea is being stirred up like eggs in a bowl. These disturbances have sunk one ship, and possibly two, that we know of, nearly sank another, and have scared a year's growth off some of the people seated around this table, including yours truly." He turned to Adler. "Professor, would you be kind enough to describe the phenomena we've witnessed, and hold forth with some of your theories."
"I'd be glad to," Adler said. He recounted the disappearance of the "unsinkable" Southern Belle and the successful search for the lost ship. He described the satellite evidence confirming the existence of giant waves in the ship's vicinity. Last, and with slightly less enthusiasm, he talked about his theory that the disturbances may not have been of natural origin. As he explained his thoughts, he looked from face to face as if he were searching for a hint of doubt. To his relief, he saw only seriousness and interest.
"Normally, we might attribute all this strange ocean activity to King Neptune kicking up his heels, but for a couple of things," he said. "Satellite imagery suggests that other areas of the oceans have been similarly disturbed, and that there is an unusual symmetry to the disturbances." Using Austin's laptop, he showed the satellite images of the killer wave concentrations.
Austin asked the Trouts to describe their descent into the maelstrom. Again, there was silence as Gamay and Paul took turns telling about being sucked into the vortex and their last-minute rescue.
"You say there was lightning at the time this whirlpool first materialized?" Hibbet said.
Gamay and Paul nodded.
Hibbet's reply was succinct. He only said, "Ah."
Zavala picked up the story thread, and told the group about boarding the resurrected ship. Hibbet was keenly interested in his description of the power plant and the damaged electrical framework on deck.
"I wish I could have been there to see it," he said.
"I can do the next best thing," Zavala said. Moments later, the digital photos he had taken of the mystery ship were displayed on the computer screen.
Austin asked Hibbet what he made of the images. The NUMA scientist stared at the screen with a furrowed brow, and asked for a second run-through of the photos.
"It's fairly obvious that a great deal of electrical power is being fed into a central point." He pointed to the cone-shaped framework. "It's hard to know what this apparatus is for in its present state."
"Joe described it as a giant spark plug," Austin said.
Hibbet scratched his head. "Probably not. More like a giant Tesla coil. Many of the circuits that make this thing tick are not visible. Where is the ship now?"
"It sank to the bottom of the sea again," Zavala said.
Hibbet's reaction wasn't what Austin expected. There was excitement in his gray eyes as he rubbed his palms together. "This beats fiddling around with antennae any day." He clicked through the computer pictures again, then he glanced around the table. "Anyone here familiar with the work of Nikola Tesla?"
"I'm the only one who reads Popular Science on a regular basis," Zavala said. "Tesla invented alternating current."
Tibbet nodded. "He was a Serbian American electrical engineer. He discovered that you could rotate a magnetic field if you took two coils at right angles and juiced them with AC current out of phase."
"I wonder if you might put that in English," Adler said politely.
Hibbet laughed. "I'll put it in a historic context. Tesla moved to the United States and worked for Thomas Edison. They became rivals. Edison advocated direct current, and there was a fierce battle. Tesla got the edge when he was commissioned to design the AC generators at Niagara Falls. He sold the patents to his induction motor to George Westinghouse, whose power system was the basis for what we use today. Edison had to be content with the electric lightbulb and the phonograph."
"Tesla filed a bunch of wild patents, as I recall," Zavala said.
"That's right. He was an eccentric genius. He filed a patent for an unmanned electrically propelled aircraft that could fly at eighteen thousand miles per hour and could be used as a weapon. He came up with something called 'teleforce,' which was a death ray that could melt airplane engines at a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. He did a lot of work on wireless transmission of electricity. He was fascinated by the possibility of focusing electrical force and amplifying its effect. He even claimed to have once produced an earthquake from his lab."
"Tesla may have simply been ahead of his time, with ballistics missiles and lasers," Austin said.
"His concepts were sound. But the execution never lived up to the expectations. He's become something of a cult figure in recent years. The conspiracy-minded suspect that various governments, including our own, have been experimenting with the more destructive aspects of Tesla's work."
"What do you think?" Austin said.
"The conspiracy theorists are missing the boat. Tesla attracted a lot of attention because he was such a flamboyant figure. The work of Lazlo Kovacs had far more potential for destruction, in my opinion. Like Tesla, he was a brilliant electrical engineer. He was from Budapest, where Tesla worked in the late eighteen hundreds, and picked up on his work in the 1930s, concentrating on extra-low-frequency electromagnetic transmission. He became worried about the possibility of electromagnetic warfare. He said that certain transmissions could be used to disrupt the atmosphere, and produce severe weather, earthquakes and all sorts of unpleasant results. He took Tesla to the next level."
"In what way?"
"Kovacs actually developed a set of frequencies whereby electromagnetic resonance could be focused and thus amplified by the material surrounding it. They were called the Kovacs Theorems. He published his findings in a scientific journal, but he refused to make public the complete set of frequencies that would allow the device he described to be built. Other scientists were skeptical of his findings without proof."