Trojan Odyssey

'Hacking into other files of historical purposes is not a criminal act.'

'I never fail to be impressed with the way you legitimize your nefarious activities.'

'I do it out of sheer benevolence.'

Max rolled her eyes. 'Spare me.'

Yaeger's index finger touched a key, and Max slowly disappeared as though she was in a state of vaporization while the urn sank into a receptacle beneath the floor of the tube.

In that instant the blue phone amid a row of colored receivers buzzed. Yaeger held the earpiece against his ear as he continued typing on his keyboard. 'Yes, Admiral.'

'Hiram,' came the voice of Admiral James Sandecker, 'I need the file on that floating monstrosity that's moored off Cabo San Rafael in the Dominican Republic.'

'I'll bring it right up to your office.'

James Sandecker, age sixty-one, was doing push-ups when Yaeger was ushered into the office by the admiral's secretary. A short man a few inches over five feet, he had a thick carpet of red hair matched by a red Vandyke beard. He glanced up at Yaeger through cool assertive blue eyes. A health addict, he jogged every morning, worked out in the NUMA gym every afternoon and ate vegetarian. His only vice was a penchant for huge custom cigars, rolled to his special order. A longtime member of the Beltway crowd, he had built NUMA into the most efficient bureaucracy in government. Though most presidents he had served under during his long term as director of NUMA did not find him a team player, his impressive record of achievement and admiration by Congress assured him of a lifetime job.

He literally jumped to his feet as he motioned Yaeger to a chair across from his desk that had once belonged in the captain's cabin of the French luxury liner Normandie before it burned in New York Harbor in 1942.

They were joined by Rudi Gunn, Sandecker's deputy director of the agency. Gunn was less than an inch taller than the admiral. A highly intelligent individual and a former commander in the navy who had served under Sandecker, Gunn stared at the world through thick-lensed horn-rim glasses. Gunn's main job was to oversee NUMA's many scientific ocean projects operating around the world. He nodded at Hiram and sat down in an adjacent chair.

Yaeger half stood and laid a thick folder in front of the admiral. 'Here is everything we have on the Ocean Wanderer.'

Sandecker opened the folder and stared at the plans for the luxury hotel that was designed and constructed as a floating resort. Self-contained, it could be towed to any one of several exotic locations throughout the world, where it would be moored for a month until it was hauled to its next picturesque site. After a minute of studying the specifications, he looked up at Yaeger, his expression grim. 'This thing is a catastrophe waiting to happen.'

'I have to agree,' said Gunn. 'Our engineering staff carefully scrutinized the interior structure and came to the conclusion that the hotel was inadequately designed to survive a violent storm.'

'What brought you to that conclusion?' asked Yaeger innocently.

Gunn stood and leaned over the desk, unrolling plans of the anchor cables that were attached to pilings driven into the seabed to anchor the hotel. He pointed with a pencil at the cables where they were secured to huge fasteners beneath the lower floors of the hotel. 'A strong hurricane could rip it off its moorings.'

'According to the specs, it's built to withstand one-hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour winds,' pointed out Yaeger.

'Not the winds we're concerned about,' said Sandecker. 'Because the hotel is moored out to sea instead of firmly embedded on hard ground, it's at the mercy of high waves that could build up as they approach shallow water and beat the structure to pieces, along with all the guests and employees inside.'

'Wasn't any of this taken into consideration by the architects?' asked Yaeger.

Sandecker scowled. 'We pointed out the problem to them, but were ignored by the founder of the resort corporation who owns it.'

'He was satisfied that an international team of marine engineers pronounced it safe,' added Gunn. 'And because the United States has no jurisdiction over a foreign enterprise, it was out of our hands to interfere with its construction.'

Sandecker put the specifications back in the file and closed it. 'Let us hope the hurricane building off West Africa will either bypass the hotel or fail to build to a Category Five with winds exceeding a hundred and fifty miles an hour.'

'I've already alerted Captain Barnum,' said Gunn, 'who is supporting the Pisces coral investigation not far from the Ocean Wanderer, to keep a wary eye on any hurricane warnings that might put them in the path of a coming storm.'

'Our center in Key West is watching the birth of one now,' said Yaeger.

'Keep me informed as well,' advised Sandecker. 'The last thing we need is a double disaster in the making.'

When Yaeger returned to his computer console, he found a green light blinking on the panel. He sat down and typed in the code that prompted Max to put in an appearance, along with the urn that rose from inside the floor.

When she fully appeared, he asked, 'Have you analyzed the urn from Pisces?'

'I have,' Max answered without hesitation.

'What did you find out?'

'The people on board Sea Sprite did a poor job of scouring away the growth,' Max complained. 'The surface still had a calcareous scale adhering to it. They didn't even bother to clean the interior. It was still filled with accretions. I had to apply every imagery system I could tap to get a relevant reading. Magnetic resonance imaging, digital X rays, 3-D laser scanner and Pulse-Coupled Neural Networks, whatever it took to obtain decent image segmentation.'

'Spare me the technical details,' Yaeger sighed patiently. 'What are the results?'

'To begin with, it is not an urn. It is an amphor because it has small handles on the neck. It was cast from bronze during the Middle to Late Bronze Age.'

'That's old.'

'Very old,' Max said confidently.

'Are you certain?'

'Have I ever been wrong?'

'No,' said Yaeger. 'I freely admit, you've never let me down.'

'Then trust me on this one. I ran a very meticulous chemical analysis of the metal. Early hardening of copper began about thirty-five hundred B.C., with the copper enriched with arsenic. The only problem was that the old miners and coppersmiths died young from the arsenic vapors. Much later, probably through an accident sometime after twenty-two hundred B.C., it was discovered that mixing ninety percent copper with ten percent tin produced a very tough and durable metal. This was the beginning of the Bronze Age. Fortunately, copper was found throughout Europe and the Middle East in great supply. But tin was fairly rare in nature and more difficult to find.'

'So tin was an expensive commodity.'

'It was then,' said Max. 'Tin traders roamed the ancient world buying ore from the mines and selling it to the people who manned the forges. Bronze produced a very advanced economy and made many of the early ancients rich. Everything was forged, from weapons — bronze spearheads, knives and swords — to small necklaces, bracelets, belts and pins for the ladies. Bronze axes and chisels greatly advanced the art of woodworking. Artisans began casting pots, urns and jars. Taken in proper perspective, the Bronze Age greatly advanced civilization.'

'So what's the amphor's story?'

'It was cast between twelve hundred and eleven hundred b.c. And in case you're interested it was cast using the lost-wax method to produce the mold.'

Yaeger sat up in his chair. 'That puts it over three thousand years old.'

Max smiled sarcastically. 'You're very astute.'