Abyss Read online

  For Laurie, as always, and for Tom Doherty, who provided the genesis, and Bob Gleason, who helped shape the story

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Details about methods and capabilities of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Rapid Response Teams have been altered. The author does not want this book to become a blueprint for nuclear terrorism.

  Anne Marie Marinaccio is the name of a real person, but she in no way is connected with the business deals described in this novel, which are completely fictitious products of the author’s imagination.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Prologue

  Part One: Fourteen Months Later

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Part Two: Through December

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Part Three: The Following Weeks

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Part Four: The Next Few Days

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Epilogue

  Books by David Hagberg

  Copyright

  Of course for a long time our central dilemma hasn’t been humanity’s survival. Since the advent of agriculture, people have striven for advancement; huts instead of caves, horses to help with plowing and transportation—particularly after the wheel and axle were invented—and then the internal combustion engine and electricity, but this brought us up against the need for oil. And the explosion began.

  In a very real way, however, our quest for the good life could well push us back to the horse-and-buggy days—if not extinction itself—given the greenhouse effects generated by the combustion of petrochemicals. In the race between climatic destruction and fossil fuel depletion, the outcome will be apocalyptic no matter which side of the coin comes up.

  Still the solution has always been around us. In the major sea currents, in the endless winds that roam the land, and in sunshine from the sky.

  The battle lines are being drawn for what could be the largest, most important struggle in human history.

  April

  The last day of the experiment was bright and warm on the Atlantic twenty-five miles off Florida’s east coast, and Dr. Evelyn Larsen, who was thirty-six, slender, with short-cropped, sun-bleached blond hair, and overly tanned skin, was in a good enough mood now to grant the interview with Fox News after all. George Szucs, the young producer and his camera crew had choppered out to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel Gordon Gunther in the early afternoon and they’d set up on the afterdeck, manned at that moment by only two crewmen operating the winch off the fantail. The sea was flat calm, and Eve, along with the other ten techs and three postdocs up in the main electronics compartment, was in high spirits.

  “The damned thing works,” Dr. Don Price, her chief assistant in his third postdoc year, said when the Big G’s generators were shut down and the ship’s power came entirely from the sea—just one tiny impeller only three feet across placed forty feet down in the middle of the Gulf Stream.

  Eve had smiled. “You had doubts?”

  Price, who was tall, husky, handsome, and bright, nodded. “Sure, didn’t you?”

  “Not really,” Eve said.

  Eve found him attractive except for his ego, which Price could not control or acknowledge, no matter how much his colleagues complained.

  He had not been supportive when Eve’s paper was published in Nature eighteen months ago. Her conclusions were so controversial she was amazed NOAA had actually sprung for two weeks aboard the ship, and funding for the ship’s crew as well as for her lab, postdocs, and techs. Someone brought out a couple of bottles of good champagne and toasted the Queen of the High Seas, because all of her postdocs and techies loved her easygoing nature, sometimes self-mocking sense of humor, and her absolute devotion to them and the project.

  Eve had raised her glass, a tickle deep in her stomach, and a little dose of smugness just at the tip of her tongue. The damned thing works, she thought.

  Growing up in Birmingham, England, with a father, three brothers, and assorted uncles and cousins, the public houses and markets and the fields of the Midland Plain had shaped her in some respects that she had tried to grow out of all her life. All the men in the family worked in the mills, leaving the women at home to do the washing, the mending, the babysitting, the cooking, and at night, briefly, the telly for some comfort, unless a soccer match was playing and money was so short the men couldn’t watch the match at the pub.

  Eve’s destiny was to marry one of the mill-bound boys in her class, or perhaps one or two forms ahead of her, and settle into the domestic routine of her clan. Each evening before bed her mother would slowly read a few passages from the Bible, her finger tracing each sentence word by word, and Eve, sitting on her lap, following her finger and listening to the sounds of the language, had learned how to read.

  By the time she got to school, she thought that she had died and gone to heaven because of the library and all the new books for her to read. The only books in her house were the Holy Bible and the union handbook. At first no one believed that she could read—and upside down and backwards at that—so her parents had been called to school to explain why their daughter was nothing but a liar who had learned some parlor trick that they had to wo
rk hard to undo.

  That’s when the verbal abuse began at home, at family gatherings, and especially at school, so that no place had seemed safe to her, and she’d rebelled, pushing herself to learn science, mathematics, philosophy, and languages, to superachieve.

  The worst day of her life had been at church when she’d told the Anglican priest that the notion of some god with long hair and a beard, who walked on water, brought dead people back to life, and whose mother had conceived him through immaculate parthenogenesis was silly. She’d been sent home in disgrace, her father had beat her with his belt, and she’d been sent to a boarding school for recalcitrant girls in the country outside Penrith in the north.

  And because of her brilliance, she had excelled for a time until the other girls became jealous. Her troubles and misery increased fourfold, pushing her into withdrawal, forcing her to hide her talent as best as she could, making her sometimes ashamed that she was smarter than the other girls, and even smarter, by the age of eleven, than her instructors.

  At fifteen, graduating three years early, she had applied to Princeton in the U.S. on a lark, and she’d been accepted with a full scholarship after she’d passed the entrance examinations sent to her boarding school. The headmistress was so delighted to be rid of the girl that the school even helped with the money to get her to the States.

  No one from her family came to see her off at the train station, or went down to Heathrow. After boarding the airplane she had not looked back.

  In England she’d been considered a freak, but at Princeton she found herself in a community of students and teachers, many of them just as smart as she was. And she’d blossomed.

  The low Florida coastline was nothing more than a smudge on the horizon marking the boundary between the gray-green Atlantic and the cloudless blue sky. The Big G rocked gently in the calm swell. Eve, dressed in white coveralls, NOAA’s insignia on the breast, hesitated for just a moment before she turned back to the Fox News producer. Her mind had wandered, now that they had come this far. This was just the beginning. And before long the crap would truly hit the fan.

  Eve to her friends, or Doc to her assistants, was NOAA’s most brilliant climatologist and oceanographer. At this moment she was in her element and yet she felt as if she were trapped, because when they were done with this stage of the experiment she would have to search for funding. It was her least favorite part of real science. God, how she hated asking—begging—for money.

  They stood on the work deck on the fantail of the 264-foot research ship that Eve’s department at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory had borrowed from NOAA’s Marine and Aviations Operations. At 2,328 tons the ship had been originally built as a T-AGOS spy ship for the CIA, but that work was better done these days by satellite. Most of the sophisticated electronic instruments had been left aboard and the stubby ship bristled with antennas, radar, and GPS domes. Tomorrow morning she and the thirteen techs and scientists would be dropped off in Miami and the crew would take the ship back to her homeport of Pascagoula, Mississippi.

  She’d been at it with the Fox News crew for the better part of an hour, and she was ready to get back to work, finalizing the week’s data set, and getting the generator back aboard.

  “Okay, Dr. Larsen, I’d love for you to sum up what you’re doing out here,” Szucs asked. “What you hope to accomplish and where it goes next? Maybe something of the long-term implications you told us about.”

  “By 2050 the world’s energy needs are going to be double what they are today,” she began. “But the fact is we’ll run out of relatively clean fossil fuels to generate the electricity that we need long before that. There’s only a finite supply. We have enough coal to last well into the next century, but if we went that route the air would become unbreathable. The entire planet would turn into Beijing on a bad day.”

  She pointed toward the coast. “Twenty-five miles away is the Hutchinson Island nuclear generating plant. In the next year permits will be given for at least thirty-four more facilities like that here in the U.S. and maybe several dozen more worldwide. That helps, but what are we supposed to do with the radioactive waste—thousands, eventually millions, of tons of the stuff?”

  She shrugged and managed a slight smile. “And yet we need to go all electric. Electric cars, ships, and airplanes, electrically heated homes, electrically operated factories. If coal is out and nukes are too dangerous we’ll have to look someplace else.”

  She was lecturing, but in the end she supposed it wouldn’t matter. They’d either listen or they would trivialize her like her ex had, which in the end was why he’d become her ex. “Of course wind farms are helping, and so are solar cells, but those technologies have a long way to go before they become commercially viable—and they’re not without their problems.”

  “How about T. Boone Pickens’s suggestion that we switch to natural gas?” Szucs asked.

  “It’s marginally okay as an interim measure, but burning gas still produces carbon dioxide. We’re in the middle of the Gulf Stream, which is a thirty-mile-wide ocean current that runs all the way up the U.S. coast and across the Atlantic to the UK as the Atlantic Drift. It’s warm water, so there are palm trees in southwestern England, which is at the same latitude as Newfoundland. It never slows down—thirty million cubic meters per second in the Florida Straits and eighty million cubic meters per second by the time it passes Cape Hatteras.”

  “That’s a lot of water.”

  “And that’s a lot of energy,” Eve said. “One-point-four petawatts—one-point-four followed by fourteen zeroes—of equivalent heat energy. More than one hundred times the energy demand of the entire world.

  “If we can harness just a tiny fraction of that power, along with energy from the Humboldt Current along the west coasts of South America and North America and the Agulhas Current around Africa, our energy problems would be at an end. We’d have cheap, clean, renewable energy. All the electricity we’d need for centuries, maybe millennia.”

  “But the energy from the Gulf Stream has to be brought ashore,” Szucs said.

  She hesitated for just a moment, the toughest part yet to come. The part that she had been sharply criticized for not only by her fellow scientists, and especially environmentalists, but by senators and congressmen from states where coal or uranium provided the economic backbone, and of course by big oil.

  “We’ve placed a small water generator fifty feet beneath us,” Eve said. “A Pax Scientific impeller shaped almost like the agitator in a top-loading washing machine, or an auger, three feet in diameter. The Gulf Stream turns the impeller, which is connected to a shaft that runs an electrical generator. In our experiment the electrical current is brought aboard where it’s used to run all of our electronics, air-conditioning, and even the bow and stern thrusters that keep us in place.

  “When we get funding we’ll place much larger impellers in the Stream with blades twenty-five feet in diameter, and run the electrical current generated ashore where it can be plugged directly into the already existing power grid—the high voltage lines you see leading away from power plants like Hutchinson Island. When the first few are up and running, Hutchinson Island can be shut down and dismantled.”

  “How many impellers?”

  “Eventually thousands, maybe tens of thousands around the world,” Eve said. “It’d be the biggest project ever undertaken in the history of the world. Thirty, maybe forty, trillions of dollars over a fifty-year period.”

  Szucs whistled in spite of himself. “What you’re talking about could bankrupt us all.”

  “We can’t afford not to do it,” Eve said. “But there’s more, something we haven’t covered yet.” The something her boss Bob Krantz, NOAA’s chief of special projects, had expressly forbidden her to bring up.

  “Make so much as a hint, and your career will be over,” he’d told her more than two years ago ago. He was a large man who’d played football for Notre Dame and had not gotten too badly out of shape yet. When he wante
d he could be physically intimidating.

  They were in his book-lined Silver Spring, Maryland, office and although Eve had been standing while he was sitting behind his desk, she’d felt as if he were towering over her. She remembered her anger at that moment. Blind, frustrating. He had her paper in front of him, and she knew that he’d read it. The science was sound, and her results good, yet he was dismissing her.

  “It’s my career, Bob,” she’d shot back.

  “Not with NOAA if you persist.”

  “Are you threatening to fire me?”

  “You won’t have a lab and you won’t have the funding to be on the water,” he said, sidestepping the question, which was his style. He’d been a fair scientist who, in Eve’s estimation, had risen to his level of incompetence.

  “Then I’ll get my own funding.”

  Krantz nodded sadly. “You’re a brilliant scientist, Eve. Too brilliant to go off half-cocked. Power generation is an attainable goal, but not on the scale you want to achieve.”

  “We’re not talking about that!” Eve had shouted, but immediately got control of herself.

  “Let me finish,” Krantz said. “Even Sunshine State Power and Light agrees that your water generators might be able to supply thirty-five percent of Florida’s needs. Which is a good thing.”

  “One hundred percent,” Eve said. “But that’s still not the issue.”

  “No,” Krantz said. He handed Eve’s paper back to her. “Send this to Nature without convincing data, and at least two other climatologists who’re willing to put themselves on the firing line, and you’re done.”

  Eve focused again on Szucs. “We can control the planet’s climate.” It was the same thing she’d told Krantz that day.

  “If you generate enough power so that coal- and oil-fired electrical plants can be shut down, it should have some effect on global warming.”

  “No, I mean control.”

  Szucs looked at her as if she were an alien from outer space who’d just landed.

  She would be sending her research to Nature once she had the final data set from this experiment. Everything she’d seen so far verified her approach. Her peers might call her a lunatic, but they wouldn’t be able to dispute the facts.