Free Polar Shift by Clive Cussler

enough to withstand the most severe weather. You said that this isn’t the first time a well-made vessel vanished. Absolutely right. A cargo ship named the Munchen disappeared in a storm while crossing the Atlantic in 1978. Like the Belle , it radioed an SOS, saying it was in trouble. No one could understand what could have happened to such a modern ship. Twenty-seven crewmen were lost.”
    â€œTragic. Was any trace of the ship ever found?” Austin asked.
    â€œRescue attempts started immediately after the SOS. More than a hundred ships combed the ocean. They found some wreckage, and an empty lifeboat that provided a valuable clue. The boat would have hung by pins on the starboard side more than sixty feet above the waterline. The steel pins attached to the boat were found to be bent from forward to aft.”
    Zavala’s mechanical mind immediately saw the significance of the damage to the ship. “Easy call,” he said. “A violent force at least sixty feet tall knocked the lifeboat off its pins.”
    â€œThe Maritime Court said the ship sank when bad weather caused an ‘unusual event.’”
    Austin chuckled. “Sounds as if the Maritime Court was dancing around the real conclusion.”
    â€œThe mariners who heard the court’s findings would agree with you. They were outraged. They knew exactly what sunk the Munchen. Sailors had been talking for years about their encounters with waves eighty or ninety feet tall, but the scientists didn’t believe their stories.”
    â€œI’ve heard the stories about monster waves, but I’ve never experienced one firsthand.”
    â€œBe thankful, because we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you had run into one of these creatures.”
    â€œIn a way, I don’t blame the Maritime Court for being cautious,” Austin said. “Sailors do have a reputation for stretching the truth.”
    â€œI can vouch for that,” Zavala said with a wistful smile. “I’ve been hearing about mermaids for years without seeing one.”
    â€œNo doubt the court was leery of headlines about vampire killer waves,” Adler said. “According to the conventional scientific wisdom at the time, waves like the ones the mariners reported were theoretically impossible. We scientists had been using a set of mathematical equations, called the Linear Model, which said that a ninety-foot wave occurs only once every ten thousand years.”
    â€œApparently, after the loss of the Munchen we don’t have anything to worry about for the next hundred centuries,” Austin said with a wry grin.
    â€œThat was the thinking before the Draupner case.”
    â€œYou’re talking about the Draupner oil rig off Norway?”
    â€œYou’ve heard of Draupner?”
    â€œI worked on North Sea rigs for six years,” Austin said. “It would be hard to find anyone on a rig who hadn’t heard about the wave that slammed into the Draupner tower.”
    â€œThe rig is about one hundred miles out to sea,” Adler explained to Zavala. “The North Sea is infamous for its lousy weather, but a real stinker of a storm came in on New Year’s Day 1985. The rig was getting battered by thirty-to forty-foot waves. Then they got slammed with a wave that the rig’s sensors measured at ninety feet. It still leaves me breathless to think about it.”
    â€œSounds like the Draupner wave washed the Linear Model down the drain,” Zavala said.
    â€œIt blew the model out of the sea. That wave was more than thirty feet higher than the model would have predicted for the ten-thousand-year wave. A German scientist named Julian Wolfram installed a radar setup on the Draupner platform. Over four years, Wolfram measured every wave that hit the platform. He found twenty-four waves that exceeded the limits of the Linear Model.”
    â€œSo the tall tales weren’t so tall,” Austin said.