"That's right. An intensive search was launched within hours. The sea seemed to have swallowed her up. It's been tough on the crew's families not knowing what happened to their loved ones. From a practical point of view, the owners would like to get their legal house in order."

"Ships have disappeared without a clue going back hundreds of years," Austin said. "It still happens, even with instantaneous and worldwide communication."

"But the Belle wasn't simply any ship. It was about as close to an unsinkable vessel as possible."

Austin grinned. "That sounds vaguely familiar."

Adler raised his finger. "I know. The same thing was said about the Titanic. But the science of shipbuilding has made huge leaps since the Titanic went down. The Belle was an entirely new type of oceangoing cargo vessel. It was built strong 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."

"Tragic. Was any trace of the ship ever found?" Austin asked.

"Rescue 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."

"The 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."

"The 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."

"I've heard the stories about monster waves, but I've never experienced one firsthand."

"Be thankful, because we wouldn't be having this conversation if you had run into one of these creatures."

"In a way, I don't blame the Maritime Court for being cautious," Austin said. "Sailors do have a reputation for stretching the truth."

"I can vouch for that," Zavala said with a wistful smile. "I've been hearing about mermaids for years without seeing one."

"No 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."

"Apparently, 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.

"That was the thinking before the Draupner case."

"You're talking about the Draupner oil rig off Norway?"

"You've heard of Draupner?"

"I 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."

"The 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."

"Sounds like the Draupner wave washed the Linear Model down the drain," Zavala said.

"It 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."

"So the tall tales weren't so tall," Austin said. "Maybe Joe will meet Minnie the Mermaid after all."

"I don't know if I'd go that far, but Wolfram's research showed that the legends had a basis in fact. When he plotted out the graph, he found that these new waves were steeper, as well as bigger, than ordinary waves. Wolfram's work hit the shipping industry like a, well, like a freak wave. For years, marine architects had used the Linear Model to build ships strong enough to handle a wave of no more than forty feet or so. Weather forecasts had been based on the same flawed premise."

"From what you're saying, every ship on the sea was vulnerable to being sunk by a killer wave," Zavala said.

Adler nodded. "It would have meant billions in retrofitting and redesign. The potential for an economic disaster spurred more research. The attention focused on the coast off South Africa where many mariners had encountered freak waves. When scientists plotted ship accidents off the African cape, they found that they lay on a line along the Agulhus current. The big waves seemed to occur primarily when warm currents ran against cold currents. Over a ten-year period in the 1990s, twenty ships were lost in this area."

"The shipping industry must have breathed a big sigh of relief," Austin said. "All a ship had to do was steer clear of that neighborhood."

"They learned it wasn't that simple. In 1995, the Queen Elizabeth II encountered a ninety-foot wave in the North Atlantic. In 2001, two tourist cruisers, the Bremen and the Caledonian Star, were slammed by ninety-foot waves far from the current. Both ships survived to tell the tale."

"That would imply that the Agulhus current isn't the only place these waves occur," Austin said.

"Correct. There were no opposing currents near these ships. We paired this information with the statistics and came to some unsettling conclusions. More than two hundred supertankers and containerships longer than six hundred feet had been sunk around the world over a twenty-year span. Freak waves seemed to play a major role in these losses."

"Those are pretty grim statistics."

"They're horrendous! Because of the serious implications for shipping, we have set out to improve ship design, and to see if forecasting is possible."

"I wonder if the research project the Trouts are working on has anything to do with these steroid waves," Zavala said.

"Paul Trout and his wife, Gamay Morgan-Trout, are our NUMA colleagues," Austin explained to the professor. "They're on the NOAA ship Benjamin Franklin, doing a study of ocean eddies in this area."

Adler pinched his chin in thought. "That's an intriguing suggestion. It's certainly worth looking into. I wouldn't rule anything out at this point."

"You said something about forecasting these freak waves," Austin said.