Clive Cussler - Trojan Odyssey

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.

Harley, Hurricane Lizzie is moving due east and accelerating. As we suspected, she has already developed into a dangerous storm. Computer model predicts winds of 150 knots with 40 to 50-foot seas within a radius 350 miles. She's moving at an incredible 20 knots.

Will keep you informed. Heidi

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.

IT 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.

Heidi 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.