Clive Cussler: Polar Shift

The guard had regained consciousness, and Gamay had to threaten him with his gun to quiet him down, but other than that there had been no incident.

"What did you find?" she said.

"Nothing. And that's what's so interesting. My guess is that the other ships are stripped down too."

They dragged the guard from the car and left him in the shadows. He had started struggling against his makeshift bindings. With a little more effort, he would be able to free himself. About a hundred feet from the guardhouse, they tossed his guns into the harbor.

There was little chance that he would raise the alarm once he got free. His employers would not be pleased if they learned he had fallen down on the job. He would have enough trouble explaining what happened to his weapons.

On the drive back to the hotel, Trout described his search of the ship and the surprising results.

"But why? And what did they do with all that stuff?"

Trout shook his head, picked up his cell phone and punched out a number from the directory.

"We'll let Kurt figure that one out."

Austin reached into his desk drawer, extracted a dart from a board game and had his hand poised to throw it at the chart of the Atlantic Ocean pinned to the wall when the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver. It was Paul Trout calling from Rio.

"Hope I'm not interrupting anything important," Trout said.

"Not at all. I was bringing my scientific training to bear on a knotty puzzle. How's the girl from Ipanema?" Austin said.

"Gamay is fine. But there's something strange going on with the transmitter ships. I snuck on board one a few minutes ago. It's been stripped of its turbines and the electromagnetic antenna. I suspect someone has done a similar housecleaning with the other ships."

"Empty?" Austin raced through the possibilities in his mind. "They must have done the housecleaning when the ships were in the Mississippi boatyard."

"We should have figured that something funny was going on. The ships are just sitting there, tied up to the dock. No preparations. Nothing to indicate that they're going to sea anytime soon. Only one ship has left the dock since we've been here, and that was an ocean liner."

Austin was deep in thought and only half listening to Trout. "What's that you said about a liner?"

"The Polar Adventure. It was tied up next to the transmitter ships, but it left earlier today. Is it important?"

"Maybe. Joe says a liner left the shipyard in Mississippi about the same time as the transmitters."

"Wow! Think this is the same vessel we saw?"

"It's possible," Austin said. "They move the transmitters into the liner. Then, while we're watching the decoys, the liner sneaks away with the payload in broad daylight."

"So much for the navy's plans to tail the ships with a submarine."

"Classic 'bait and switch' operation. Damned clever."

"How long since the liner left port?"

"It was gone this morning."

Austin did a quick mental computation. "They could be hundreds of miles out to sea by now. That's a jackrabbit start."

"What do you want us to do?"

"Stay put for now, and keep an eye on the ships in case their owners have another card up their sleeve."

Austin clicked off. He was angry with himself for not anticipating that anyone intelligent enough to carry out a polar reversal would do everything possible to throw pursuers off their trail. He turned his attention back to the chart. It was a big ocean. With every passing minute, the liner came closer to losing itself in hundreds of square miles of open sea. He thought about calling the Pentagon with the news from Trout, but he was in no mood to waste his breath debating the assistant defense secretary.

Sandecker might be more successful, but even he would have to deal with the Pentagon bureaucracy, and there was simply no time. Screw 'em, Austin thought. If the world was going to end, he would rather have the responsibility on his shoulders than those of an anonymous government functionary with an attitude. This was going to be a NUMA deal, through and through.

Ten minutes later, he was in a NUMA vehicle driving through the quiet streets of Washington. He took the highway to Washington National Airport, where the guard at the gate of a restricted area checked his ID and directed Austin to a hanger in a far corner of the airfield. He could see the glow of lights, and easily made his way to where a Boeing 747 jumbo jet was parked on the tarmac.

Floodlights set up on stands ringed the huge plane and turned night into day. The plane was surrounded by drums of electrical cable and stacks of aluminum and steel. Workers crawled in and out of the plane like ants on a candy bar.

Zavala sat under the lofty tail of the plane at a makeshift table assembled from a sheet of plywood and a couple of sawhorses. He was going over blueprints with a man dressed in coveralls. He excused himself when he saw Austin and came over to greet him.

"It's not as bad as it looks," he said. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the noise.

Austin glanced around and was relieved to see a semblance of order in what at first seemed to be total chaos.

"How long before the bird is ready to fly?" Austin said.

"We've had a few glitches, but all the stuff is here. It's mostly a matter of fitting everything in and connecting it. Seventy-two hours should do it."

"How about tomorrow morning?" Austin said.

Zavala smiled. "You should get a slot on Comedy Central."

"Unfortunately, there's nothing comic about the news I just received from Paul." He told Zavala about the missing liner. "Could you assemble the rest of the setup while we're in the air?"

Zavala winced. "Possible, but not advisable. It would be like trying to stuff a sausage on the run."

"What if there's no choice but to try?"

Zavala looked at the hectic activity and scratched his head. "I never could resist a juicy sausage. C'mon while I break the bad news to my right-hand man."

The man Zavala had been reviewing blueprints with was Drew Wheeler, an amiable Virginian in his forties who was a NUMA specialist in the logistics of moving big payloads around the world. Austin had worked with Drew on a few projects where heavy equipment was needed in a hurry. Wheeler's tendency to think things through, as if he were mentally chewing on a plug of tobacco, could drive people who worked with him to distraction. But they soon learned that he had a knack for laying out complex plans in his head so they could be executed seamlessly.

Austin asked how things were going and got the typical Wheeler response. He cocked an elbow on one hip and squinted at the plane from under his eyebrows like a farmer trying to figure out how to remove a tree trunk from a field. "Well," he said, pausing before he answered. "Things are going okay."

"Are they okay enough to get this plane off the ground tomorrow morning?"

Wheeler chewed the question over for a moment before he replied. "What time tomorrow morning?"

"As soon as you can make it."

Wheeler nodded. "I'll see what I can do."

He ambled back to the plane as if out for a casual walk. Austin wasn't fooled. "I'll bet you a bottle of Pancho Villa tequila that Drew's already figured out how to do this."

"I know him well enough to recognize that's a sucker bet," Zavala said.

"A wise decision. Where did you get the plane?"

"You'd be surprised what you can lease these days if you've got deep pockets. It's the 200F freighter, a modified version of the passenger 747. It's got a capacity of nearly 250 thousand pounds. The main problem was to get all the hardware you see lying around into the plane without having to crack it open like a can of sardines. We tossed the problem around awhile with Hibbet and Barrett," Zavala said. "I had it in my mind that we'd have to go with massive generators like the ones we saw on the transmitter ship. But Barrett said it wasn't necessary. We could use smaller generators, just more of them."