Shock Wave(152)

"Can you estimate the physical reaction?"

"Headaches and vertigo along with mild nausea should be the only discomforts."

"A moot point if we can't set a reflector on site before the convergence," Gunn said, staring at a chart on the wall.

Sandecker drummed his fingers on the table thoughtfully. "Which puts us back in the starter's gate before the race."

A woman in her forties, fashionably dressed in a conservative blue suit, stared contemplatively at one of the admiral's paintings, the one illustrating the famous World War II aircraft carrier Enterprise during the battle for Midway. Her name was Molly Faraday, and she was a former analyst with the National Security Agency who had jumped over to NUMA at Sandecker's urging, to be his intelligence agency coordinator. With soft toffee-colored hair and brown eyes, Molly was all class. Her gaze swiveled from the painting to Sandecker and fixed him with a somber look.

"I think I might have the solution to our problems," she said in a quiet monotone.

The admiral nodded. "You have the floor, Molly."

"As of yesterday," she lectured, "the Navy's aircraft carrier Roosevelt was docked at Pearl Harbor, taking on supplies and making repairs to one of her flight-deck elevators before joining the Tenth Fleet off Indonesia."

Gunn looked at her curiously. "You know that for certain?"

Molly smiled sweetly. "I keep my toes dipped in the offices of the Joint Chiefs."

"I know what you're thinking," said Sandecker. "But without a reflector, I fail to see how a carrier at Pearl Harbor can solve our dilemma."

"The carrier is a side bonus," explained Molly. "My primary thought was a recollection of an assignment at a satellite information collection center on the Hawaiian island of Lanai."

"I didn't know Lanai had a satellite facility," said Yaeger. "My wife and I honeymooned on Lanai and drove all over the island without seeing a satellite downlink facility."

"The buildings and parabolic reflector are inside the extinct Palawai volcano. Neither the natives, who always wondered what was going on in there, nor the tourists could ever get close enough to check it out."

"Besides tuning in on passing satellites," asked Ames, "what was its purpose?"

"Passing Soviet satellites," Molly corrected him. "Fortunately, the former Soviet military chiefs had a fetish for guiding their spy satellites over the military bases on the Hawaiian Islands after they orbited the U.S. mainland. Our job was to penetrate their transponders with powerful microwave signals and foul up their intelligence photos. From what the CIA was able to gather, the Russians never did figure out why their satellite reconnaissance photos always came back blurred and out of focus. About the time the Communist government disintegrated, newer space communications facilities made the Palawai facility redundant. Because of its immense size, the antenna was later utilized to transmit and receive signals from deep-space probes. Now I understand that its dated technology has made the facility's equipment obsolete, and the site, though still guarded, is pretty much abandoned."

Yaeger jumped right to the heart of the matter. "How large is the parabolic reflector?"

Molly buried her head in her hands a moment before looking up. "I seem to recall that it was eighty meters in diameter."

"More than the surface area we require," said Ames. "Do you think the NSA will let us borrow it?"

asked Sandecker.

"They'd probably pay you to carry it away."

"You'll have to dismantle it and airlift the pieces to' Pearl Harbor," said Ames, "providing you can borrow the carrier Roosevelt to reassemble and lower it on the convergence area."

Sandecker looked squarely at Molly. "I'll use my powers of persuasion with the Navy Department if you'd work on the National Security Agency end."

"I'll get on it immediately," Molly assured him.

A balding man with rimless glasses, sitting near the end of the table, raised a hand.

Sandecker nodded at him and smiled. "You've been pretty quiet, Charlie. Something must be stirring around in your brain."

Dr. Charlie Bakewell, NUMA's chief undersea geologist, removed a wad of gum from his mouth and neatly wrapped it in paper before dropping it in a wastebasket. He nodded at the image of Dr. Ames in the holograph. "As I understand this thing, Dr. Ames, the sound energy alone can't destroy human tissue, but enhanced by the resonance coming from the rock chamber which is under assault by the acoustic mining equipment, its frequency is reduced so that it can propagate over vast distances. When it overlaps in a single ocean region, the sound is intense enough to damage human tissue."