“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.