Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue From the Cold War

DEEP SUBMERGENCE BY JOSEPH WALLACE

A thousand feet down. Water pressure: About 435 pounds per square inch.

The creature hung outside the porthole, fragile and crystalline as a chain made from blown glass. Lit only by the gleams of sunlight filtering down from the surface far above, and by the dim glow of the submersible’s running lights. Not bothered at all by the cold, the dark, or the pressure.

Jack Harbison put his face up to the porthole’s three-inch-thick window to get a closer look.

“What do you see?” one of the other two men in the cabin asked.

Harbison didn’t reply, though he could have. He was no scientist, but if you worked as a sub pilot for long enough you couldn’t help but learn something.

He was looking at a giant siphonophore, a whole mess of little individual organisms — each of which had its own job, hunting, digesting, excreting — that had joined together to form one huge animal. Working as a unit to scare away predators that would gobble up any one of them on its own.

Harbison could see only a portion of this one, but he guessed it might be fifty feet long. He knew he wouldn’t take it on, not if he were on the other side of the glass.

Not even if he could survive out there.

As the Deep Submergence Vehicle Alvin sank through the midwater, the siphonophore drifted away. Harbison craned his neck to keep it in view, hoping for the show, knowing it would come.

And then it did. Something startled the enormous creature. A stray current, perhaps, a touch from one of the sub’s two robotic arms, or merely some electrical impulse transmitted through whichever individual comprised its brain. All at once, the entire chain flared with light. An unearthly blue-green outlined its shape, and at its core, jagged crimson webs like lightning.

Even though Harbison had seen such things many times before, his breath caught. Nearly everything out here in the murky midwater could light up, glow with cold fire, but the sight always awed him.

He watched till the siphonophore, dark again, drifted out of sight. The view outside the window was empty… except for some shadowy forms that never came close enough for him to make out. Sharks? Giant squid? Something big and dangerous, most likely.

It didn’t matter. Nothing was breaching the submersible, not from outside. The three of them were safe inside the personnel sphere. Cramped — the capsule was less than seven feet in diameter — but protected by its reinforced steel walls.

Harbison straightened, checked the instruments. They’d passed two thousand feet, and everything was fine.

Everything was always fine with Alvin. In public, Harbison always called it “the tugboat,” as if he found its tiny dimensions absurd. That twenty-three-foot-long hull, the spindly arms with their Erector-set claws, thruster propellers that resembled nothing so much as the ones that you wound up with rubber bands to make your toy ship speed across the bathtub. Ridiculous.

But the truth was, though he never said this out loud, Harbison thought that in some strange way Alvin was alive. Sentient. After dozens of dives aboard the diminutive sub, he felt he barely had to give it orders. The slightest touch on the controls would take him wherever he wanted to go.

Harbison shook his head. Stephens, the older of the two other men in the sphere, looked up. His lips thinned, and the furrows on his cheeks, like matching dueling scars, deepened.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

Harbison said, “Nothing.”

“You want the kid to take over?” Stephens asked.

The kid, Michaels, the third one in the sphere. The youngest, at twenty-five, more than a decade younger than Harbison. The back-up pilot on this crucial mission.

“No,” Harbison said. “I’m fine.”

A lie.

It’s happened again.

The word had run through the cafeterias, dorms, laboratories, and offices of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, just as it had two years earlier. Like some vast neural pathway linking everyone’s brain. A human hive mind, like the one bees used.

Harbison had just left Bigelow Laboratory when someone told him. Without thinking, he’d turned his head and looked down Water Street. Seeing, as almost always in this season, the horde of summer people gathering around the shops and restaurants or just wandering aimlessly as they waited for their ferries to carry them to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

At the best of times, Harbison felt like the tourists were a different species. He spent months each year out at sea, while for them the staid forty-five-minute ferry ride to the Vineyard was an ocean adventure. He journeyed to depths and saw things they could not imagine, while they stayed on the surface, oblivious.

He knew when the United States lost a nuclear weapon, as it had now. Again. He knew when it happened, and what it meant, and what the consequences could be.

If the government had its way, the rest of them, the world’s innocents, never would.

“Where?” he asked when they were all together. Eight of them around a conference table. Fewer than Harbison would have guessed, given how the military usually worked. It looked like this was going to be a quick and dirty operation.

The director of the Oceanographic Institution, who was Harbison’s boss. A representative of the U.S. Navy and one from the Air Force, in elegant suits, not uniforms. Two men from the Defense Department, in slightly less spiffy suits. Harbison and Michaels, the pilots.

And the old man, Christopher Stephens. The minute Harbison saw him in the room, he knew what was going to happen. All he needed were the details.

“You hear about that incident in Monterey?” one of the Defense guys said.

Harbison nodded. Of course he had. Everyone had. It had been in the newspapers just a few days earlier. “Sure. That B-52 out of Travis AFB. A bird or something got sucked into the engine—”

“Or something,” the Air Force guy said.

Michaels blinked. “You talking sabotage?”

Harbison kept his gaze on the table before him.

The officials all frowned, and the Air Force guy went on. “It went down. Three of the crew ejected safely, but the pilot’s seat malfunctioned and he went down with it.”

Harbison raised his eyes, sat up a little straighter. “And they were carrying hydrogen bombs, like last time.”

“Just one,” the Defense guy said.

“Bet you’re planning on handing out medals for that,” Harbison said. “I mean, last time it was four.”

The Oceanographic’s director looked sorrowful, but the military guys all fixed Harbison with identical steely stares. He might even have been intimidated, if he’d cared.

“How big was this one?” he asked.

The Air Force guy grimaced. His face was suddenly gray, weary. “Bigger payload than the last time. A hundred kilotons.”

“How far offshore?”

“Something like three miles.”

“You might not have read this page in the search-and-recovery manual,” Harbison said in a lazy voice, “but parts of Monterey Canyon go down two miles or more out there. That bomb is likely way out of reach.”

More glares. They really hated him. Hated having to clue him in.

Only Stephens, the old man, seemed amused, looking down at his gnarled hands linked on the table before him. His lips twitched, causing the lines on either side of his mouth to deepen.

It was the Navy guy who spoke. “According to estimates taken from the testimony of witnesses, we don’t think it went down into the canyon.” He frowned. “We are having difficulty confirming that with sonar, though.”

“The deep scattering layer is getting in the way,” the director said.

Harbison nodded. Of course it was, in a place like Monterey Bay. Wherever there was nutrient-rich water, countless masses of zooplankton — tiny plants and animals — gathered. Every day, the enormous assemblage rose and fell in the water column, moving toward the surface at night, into deeper water during the day. Scientists called it the largest migration of life on earth.

Though you could pass through the deep scattering layer in Alvin without even noticing, it played hell with sonar. From the surface, you could look at the screen and think your sound waves were bouncing off the sea floor, when they were actually reflecting off the mass of plankton in the midwater.

Made searching for something little, like a crashed plane and a nuclear bomb, nearly impossible from above.

“How many ships you got looking?” Harbison asked.

“Enough.”

“And you’re hoping to keep that under your hat?” Harbison laughed. “In Monterey? You must have turned into a tourist attraction already.”

“It’s a search and recovery for the pilot, that’s all,” the Navy man said. “All anyone needs to know. And it’s no lie. We don’t leave anyone down there if we can avoid it.”

If we can avoid it. That was the important phrase. Truth was, countless pilots and officers and grunts lay in unmarked graves all over the planet, and plenty of them were American.

And not just members of the military, either. Civilians, too. Collateral damage.

Harbison looked at Michaels, who looked back at him and spoke. “Which one of us goes?”

“Both of you,” the guy from Defense said. “Just in case.”

“And Stephens here, he comes along for the ride,” Harbison said, shifting his gaze. “Like last time.”

Everyone nodded. Stephens would form the second half of the search-and-recovery mission. He was the guy who had created and built the CARV, the Cable-controlled Aquatic Recovery Vehicle, an unmanned submersible that would bring the bomb to the surface after Alvin found it.

Alvin had its robotic arms, but they’d been designed to grab comparatively lightweight scientific specimens, and (though Harbison disagreed) the military didn’t trust them to be strong enough to haul the bomb back to the surface. The CARV, on the other hand, had but one purpose: To retrieve lost torpedoes and bombs from the sea floor.

Plus, it had one other advantage: A camera that could transmit along a cable back to the surface. Once Alvin had pinpointed the bomb’s location, the CARV could swoop down, take a look, and do the rest.

Harbison had seen it in action once before, the first time he’d worked with Stephens. He hadn’t been impressed. If Alvin felt like a living creature to him, the CARV was more like a mechanical dog, programmed to fetch.

He raised his gaze and saw Stephens looking at him. There was a glint in the old man’s eyes, but it was buried deep, and no one else saw it.

The second guy from Defense, who’d been silent till now, was the one who said what they were all thinking.

“Well, gentlemen, this is a colossal fuck-up,” he said. “But we dodged a bullet that the thing didn’t hit land. Can you imagine the consequences if that had happened?”

They all could. Harbison snorted.

“I’ve been stationed out there,” the Navy man said. “The California coast. The wind always blows onshore. East.”

Everyone nodded. They all knew the direction of the prevailing winds out there.

“What’s the population within a radius of fifty miles?” Harbison asked.

No one answered. But the Navy man said, “Not to mention the Central Valley.”

Harbison thought about it. The steady winds blowing out of the west, sweeping through the mountain passes of the Coast Range and heading east into the valley.

Some of the most heavily farmed land on the continent.

He looked across the table, and saw the hidden glint again in Stephens’s eyes.

Harbison’s boss asked him to stay after the meeting ended. His expression mixed confusion, anger, and sadness.

“What on earth is wrong with you?” he asked.

Harbison was silent.

“You keep yanking on their tails, eventually they’re going to turn around and bite you.”

“Let them.” Harbison spoke in a savage tone. “Let them bite, and then they can go out and find another pilot as good as I am and ask him to find that bomb.”

“Jack,” the director said, raising his hands. “Listen. I was just—”

But Harbison had already turned his back and was heading out the door.

Twenty-two hundred feet. Still descending.

While they’d been heading down, the sun had set up above. The recovery was being carried out at night, in secret, as everything about this mission had been. Only two Navy ships on the surface, along with the CARV on its tender, all waiting for Alvin to reach its destination.

They were traveling through a dead zone now. Alvin’s lights barely penetrated the black water, illuminating only a multitude of tiny white and brown and red flecks drifting slowly downward themselves. Harbison knew what these were: The organic remains of leaves, fish, whales. Humans. Whatever had died up above.

It was a constant, endless organic snowstorm that provided a feast for the creatures that inhabited the lightless environment of the ocean floor below. The blind eels, giant white crabs, bulbous-eyed fish with shining fleshy lures where their tongues should be.

“How long?” Stephens said.

Harbison took a deep breath. Even though he was wearing a wool jacket, his skin felt cold.

“Soon,” he said.

Too soon.

The last time it happened.

Another thing the innocent tourists waiting for their ferries didn’t know: The skies above them were filled with B-52s carrying nuclear weapons. These jets crisscrossed the earth at all times of the day and night, preparing for — or forestalling — the next world war.

There was one big problem, though: a B-52 couldn’t fly all the way from the U.S. to Europe on one tank of fuel. It had to refuel in mid-air, coordinating with a KCF-135 tanker jet and connecting its gas tank to a boom dangling from the tanker.

This was a delicate operation at a couple hundred miles an hour, a test of piloting skill. Two and a half years earlier, in January 1966, a B-52 pilot flying over Spain had failed the test. He’d run into the KC-135’s fueling boom, ripping his plane apart and causing the tanker jet to explode.

Everyone on the KC-135 died, as did three of the seven men on the bomber. However spectacular, none of this would have been worth remembering — military pilots and crew died all the time, after all, even when the war was cold, not hot — if it hadn’t been for the B-52’s cargo.

Four 70-kiloton hydrogen bombs had gone down with the wreckage. One of them had fallen into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Palomares, a small fishing town on Spain’s coast.

The Navy had sent thirty-three ships to try to locate the wreckage. But it was Alvin that finally succeeded in finding the bomb more than half a mile down.

Alvin and the CARV, and their pilots and designers, had their moments of fame. But what Harbison remembered most about that time was all the weeks of waiting in Palomares while the Navy narrowed down the search area.

And meeting Adriana, of course.

Depth: 4,260 feet.

They had landed on a ledge protruding from a cliff face. Lit by the beam of Alvin’s harsh floodlights, the cliff was a steep gray expanse. Here and there rocky spires emerged from the murk, looking half-melted, protean.

This was the midnight zone, where sunlight never penetrated. No plants grew. Nothing photosynthesized. Everything that lived down here ate meat.

Harbison and Michaels had located the B-52’s wreckage, half-buried in silt, three days earlier. It lay on the ledge amid half a dozen outcroppings that pointed like twenty-foot-long stony fingers toward the canyon just beyond.

Now they were back, with Stephens, to watch and wait as the CARV descended, controlled by an operator on its tender. Its cameras would allow it to spot them and then the bomb, and to do its job.

Harbison bent over the controls, maneuvering Alvin between two smokestack-shaped rock promontories. The little sub could easily get caught here, trapped, turning within a few hours into a tomb.

The downed B-52, hidden from his sight for a few minutes, came back into view. Harbison could see the tailfin of the bomb emerging from a tangle of what had once been the jet’s fuselage.

They’d been lucky. Another fifty yards or so west and the ruined jet — and its cargo — would have fallen another mile or more to the bottom of the canyon. And stayed there forever.

Stephens was staring through his porthole. “There it is,” he said.

“Yeah,” Michaels said, “we know.”

He sounded bored. There was no role for a copilot on Alvin, and there was no pilot born who enjoyed being a spare tire.

“How long till your boat shows up?” Michaels asked Stephens, “I want to get the hell out—”

He never finished the sentence. His words turned into a harsh cry of terror and pain.

Harbison couldn’t turn around. Not immediately. First he had to shut off the thrusters, or else risk running Alvin into a rock wall.

But he didn’t need to look. He knew what had just happened.

When had Harbison figured it out?

That was easy: The first time he and Stephens been together, heading down to retrieve the hydrogen bomb that had been lost off Palomares.

The seas had been rougher than usual, and the bomb, located a little more than half a mile down, was not deep enough to avoid tidal surges and strong currents.

Stephens had gotten seasick.

In the tiny cabin, this was never pleasant, either for the man suffering or for his trapped companions. The smell alone could make seasickness contagious, if you were a greenhorn.

But Harbison had seen — and smelled — it all by now. It happened often enough when scientists came down on their first descent. He didn’t particularly enjoy the experience, but he was used to it.

After twenty minutes of explosive vomiting into the sick bags Alvin always carried in abundance, Stephens fell into a doze that was more like semiconsciousness. This was typical, too, and Harbison, feeling a little sorry for the old man, let him rest as they descended. He wasn’t needed yet.

During both descent and ascent, Alvin’s journey was almost entirely silent. It used no engine in either direction. Weighted with steel ballast, it fell through the water like a stone. After its mission was complete, it dumped the ballast and popped back to the surface like a slow-motion cork.

Its only engines were the thrusters, designed for short-term maneuvering and keeping the sub in position.

After a few minutes of silence broken only by the musical sound of the water buffeting the submersible as it fell, Stephens started muttering. At first it sounded just like nonsense, random syllables, and Harbison paid it no mind.

Then the old man’s voice rose and he spoke more clearly. Harbison felt himself grow still, and inside his chest his heart thumped. He still couldn’t understand the words, but he had no problem figuring out what language the old man was using.

No adult living and working anywhere around the United States military could fail to recognize Russian when he heard it. Especially when it was coming from the mouth of a man who was about to be in close proximity to a hydrogen bomb.

A few moments later, Stephens came back to awareness. Harbison watched as his eyes went from hazy to sharp, and only looked away as the old man fixed him with a sudden, sharp stare.

But neither of them said a word. Soon afterward they got busy recovering the bomb, and it was as if the incident, the revelation, had never happened.

Except it had.

By the time Harbison was able to shut off the thrusters and turn away from his porthole, Michaels was lying on the floor. In the tight space, his kicking legs collided with the seats and thudded against the metal walls. His pale, red-rimmed eyes were glassy, and spit was flowing from his stretched-wide mouth. He was gasping loudly, the sounds echoing off the metal walls.

Stephens had a gun in his right hand, something silver, with a long barrel.

“Great idea,” Harbison said, “using one of those in a pressurized cabin a mile down.”

Stephens smiled and shrugged. “These darts won’t penetrate the walls.”

Now Harbison saw the metal shaft emerging from Michaels’s neck. The spasms coursing through the dying man’s body had diminished to deep shivers.

“That wasn’t the plan,” Harbison said.

Stephens shrugged. “He was too noisy.”

“And me?”

Stephens raised the weapon. Harbison could see the tip of the arrow resting in the barrel.

Then the old man let his arm fall. “You I trust,” he said. “Enough.”

He sat down on his stool and placed the gun on the floor beside his foot. “Fire up those thrusters again,” he said, “and I’ll tell you what we do next.”

Harbison took another few seconds, then turned back to the instrument panel.

Alvin rose from the rock face and moved forward.

Harbison had spent months after returning from Spain asking questions, making inquiries, calling in favors. Never saying exactly what it was he was looking for, or why, but learning all he needed to know by the end. Doing what he did for a living, he’d met a lot of people who could answer his questions.

Finally he knew enough to pay a visit to Christopher Stephens.

The headquarters and laboratories of Vision Industries, the company that built the CARV, were located in a corporate park near the New Jersey Turnpike. Just another set of long, low buildings made of yellow-gray stone and glass, with the future being created inside.

You never knew what was going on inside those anonymous buildings. Or wanted to know, if you were most people.

When he walked in the door of the corner office, its windows overlooking a pond with geese floating in it, the old man looked up at him but did not bother to stand.

“I heard you’ve been sniffing around,” he said. His voice was deep and gravelly, his eyes cold behind the fleshy ridges that bracketed them. “Now I’m guessing you’ve come to threaten me.”

Harbison glanced around. “Anyone listening in on us?”

“Of course not.” Stephens steepled his fingers. “So talk.”

Harbison talked. He told about what he’d overheard when Stephens had gotten sick onboard Alvin, what he’d suspected, what he’d learned since coming back home. What he believed Stephens’s ultimate plans were.

As he listened, Stephens relaxed, tension leaving the line of his jaw and the furrowed skin above his cheekbones. “Ah,” he said at last. “I see. Not threats. Blackmail.”

“No,” Harbison said. “Teamwork.”

At last the old man seemed surprised. His gaze grew cold again. “You want to… work with me?” he said cautiously.

“Yes.”

“Why should I believe that?”

“Because if I didn’t want something, I would just have turned you in.”

Stephens shrugged, though his expression was angry. “I’m not afraid of that. I’m… well protected.”

“Maybe you are. But it would be a terrific pain in your ass, wouldn’t it?” Harbison drew in a breath. “You’re right. I’m here because I want something in return. But it’s not money.”

“What, then?”

Harbison didn’t answer directly. “If something like Palomares happens again—”

“Oh, it will.” The old man’s eyes gleamed. “There’s always a next time.”

“Bring me in on it.”

For a long moment Stephens stared up into his face. “If it’s not for money,” he asked again, “then why?”

Harbison didn’t reply.

Stephens straightened in his chair. “For me to believe you, you must tell me.”

Still Harbison hesitated. Then, at last, voice harsh, breath short, he began to speak.

Telling the story he’d never told to anyone before.

In Palomares, the only bomb Harbison had cared about was the one that had fallen into the water, the one he waited weeks to retrieve.

The three that hit land didn’t concern him.

It was only later that he heard what had happened to them. None had been fully armed, meaning they couldn’t explode with five times the power of the bombs that had flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki just twenty-one years earlier. The bombs that had started the arms race and the Cold War.

Small favors. But that didn’t mean that the citizens of Palomares were free and clear. The reason: Every nuclear weapon came packed with conventional explosives as well as nuclear material. When two of the Palomares bombs hit the ground after a six-mile free fall from the doomed jet, their explosives detonated.

The military claimed that no one was killed by the explosions themselves. What came out later was the fact that a cloud of radioactive material — plutonium dust — was blown hundreds of feet in the air by each exploding bomb and dispersed by the wind over the surrounding farmland.

While farmers, unaware of the dangers, unprotected, continued to till their poisoned fields, teams of American scientists and soldiers in hazard suits dug up countless tons of tainted dirt, which was then shipped to a plant in South Carolina for decontamination.

Of course the residents of surrounding areas were alarmed. Who wouldn’t be? But scientists claimed that the level of exposure couldn’t possibly be harmful. To prove it, the Spanish minister for information and the U.S. ambassador even went swimming off a nearby beach for newspaper and TV reporters.

By the time the first reports of radiation sickness came in, it was too late.

Harbison had met Adriana in the café where she worked in Palomares. Perhaps thirty, she was dark, pretty, lively, with a mass of black hair that she wore pulled back, revealing her high forehead and eyes full of intelligence and merriment.

Adriana knew enough English that, alongside his workmanlike Spanish, they could converse. And she seemed to like him, a rare enough occurrence to be worth noticing.

If he’d told anyone about her, they would have laughed. A summer-camp romance, they would have called it. A fling. Something to enjoy, then forget as soon as you went home.

But for the Alvin pilot, condemned to spend eight or nine months a year out at sea, it was much more.

Day after day, waiting for his mission to begin, he hung around the café, drinking coffee, watching the people come and go, and grabbing Adriana’s few free moments to chat. As the days passed, she took to spending her breaks with him, and then they started to meet in the evenings as well.

They never spent a night together, though. Not once. Every evening she went home to her parents’ farm outside of town. A farm located just two miles from where the explosives on one of the hydrogen bombs had detonated, spewing a plume of radioactivity into a stiff wind.

By the time the lost bomb was found, and Harbison was called to work, Adriana was looking thin and feeling unwell.

By the time he returned, she was in the hospital, already a grotesque scarecrow version of the plump, talkative girl she’d been.

And by the time he was called back to the United States for debriefing, she was dead.

No one ever made the news public, or took responsibility.

Harbison guided Alvin closer to the wreck, which lay between two of the twisted spires. The floodlights showed that its nose, still mostly intact, was pointing upward, while the rest, a jumble of jagged shards, lay around and beneath it.

Something caught his eye. Motion. A human arm and hand, the bones of the fingers and forearm protruding through gray ragged skin, waving in the slight current. Below lay the white blur of a half-skeletal, eyeless face.

The B-52’s pilot.

Harbison saw a sudden, slithering movement. A hagfish rose into the light, the heavy slime that coated its snakelike body catching Alvin’s floodlights. It stared through the porthole with eyes like holes, and its nightmare mouth, a black cavern ringed by gleaming teeth, gaped at him.

Other hagfish moved in the shadows beneath it. Perhaps a dozen more, writhing in the dead pilot’s midsection, gorging on the unexpected deep-sea bounty of flesh.

Alvin moved forward, leaving the feast behind. Ahead lay the rest of the wreckage and the bomb. It was shaped like a torpedo and composed of black steel that absorbed the light and reflected nothing.

And beyond it, behind one more line of rocky spires, lay the black abyss of Monterey Canyon.

“Okay,” Stephens said, gesturing. “Pick it up.”

But before Harbison engaged the thrusters, he felt an odd vibration tickling the front of his spine. It grew stronger, still not quite a sound, more like the throbbing at the onset of a migraine headache.

“Ah,” the old man said, lifting a hand. “Wait.”

Ten seconds later there came a muffled thud and a brilliant flash of light, just as quickly extinguished, in the middle distance. Alvin jolted where it stood. When it settled, the vibration was gone.

Harbison said, “That was your baby?”

“The CARV, yes.” Stephens gave a shrug. Then he smiled. “Easy enough to plant a limpet mine on it, designed to go off at depth.”

Harbison understood. “Without its cameras, they’re blind up top now.”

The old man smiled. “Yes, blind and panicking. Scrambling around, trying to figure out what happened to their robot sub… and us, too. Blind, deaf, lost.”

Harbison thought about it. “With the deep scattering layer, they won’t even be able to find us on sonar.”

Stephens nodded. “Right now they just think they’re in the middle of a fiasco. By the time they figure out what really happened, we’ll be long gone.” He made a delicate gesture with the fingers of both hands, like a bomb exploding. “And they’ll have plenty of other things to worry about.”

That had been the part of the plan Harbison had heard, though he’d been spared the details. Pick up the bomb. Return unseen to the surface, where they would be met by two boats run by Stephens’s compatriots. Once they’d taken the bomb aboard, they’d sink Alvin over the depths of Monterey Canyon, where it would never be found.

One boat would then head inland to launch the attack. The other, with Stephens and Harbison onboard, would head west, into international waters, to meet up with the larger ship that would carry them to safety.

It was guaranteed that at first the military would have no idea where the two of them had gone, or even if they were still alive. There would be a search, but it was likely that in the long run Harbison would be declared dead, a captain gone down with his ship.

And, as Stephens had said, once the conventional explosives on the hydrogen bomb had detonated, sending a vast cloud of radioactive material over densely populated northern California and across into the fertile Central Valley, the U.S. government was going to have plenty on its hands. By the time the search resumed, their trails would have gone cold.

As close to a foolproof plan as you could devise.

Though, of course, no plan was completely foolproof.

At the end of their conversation in Stephens’s New Jersey office, Harbison had said, “Why?”

The old man had raised bushy gray eyebrows in an answering question. But Harbison knew he understood, and merely waited.

Finally Stephens said, “Fear.”

Harbison was quiet.

“Fear,” Stephens said, “is powerful. Yet you Americans have never felt it here, not real fear, not on your own soil. For you, it’s always someplace else. Everyplace else.” His mouth twisted. “Fear loses wars, especially the ones that last for decades.”

Still Harbison didn’t speak.

“And you?” the old man said.

Harbison was ready for the question. “Revenge,” he said. “Of course.”

And kept his gaze steady.

On a typical mission, his next step would have been to dump ballast and head for the surface. But this time, the bomb securely clasped in Alvin’s claws — up to the task, as he’d known they’d be — he followed Stephens’s instructions. Using the thrusters to move north, then west, then north again, maneuvering into position over Monterey Canyon in preparation for making their rendezvous at the surface.

Following instructions, that is, for every move but the last one. That one he took on his own.

When Stephens said, “Fifty meters south,” he set the thrusters on idle instead. The submersible hung in the water, quivering.

In the sudden stillness, Harbison looked out the porthole at the pitch-black void that lay below them. A strange current like the flat of a huge hand tried to push the submersible down into the canyon.

But he wasn’t staring at eternity. In his mind he saw only Adriana, the way she’d looked in the hospital, the last time he’d seen her.

Stephens glanced over. His expression showed only annoyance, as if he thought his orders simply hadn’t been heard correctly.

Then his eyes widened at what he saw in Harbison’s face.

“I couldn’t do it,” Harbison said, reaching for the inside pocket of his wool jacket. “I never could.”

Stephens went still for an instant. He stood just a few feet away, but that moment’s hesitation was enough. Had Harbison had a gun, he could have put a bullet through the old man’s head.

Yet it wasn’t a gun that Harbison pulled from his inside pocket. It was a hammer.

With his left hand he shut off the thrusters. With the hammer in his right he smashed their controls, at the same time bracing his legs for the jolt.

Alvin fell into the darkness.

I’m sorry, Harbison said to it. I’m sorry.

He heard Stephens curse, lose his balance, stagger against the far wall. A sharp metallic sound as his gun slid across the floor.

A second blow of the hammer, and the switches that released the ballast, that allowed the sub to rise to the surface, were damaged beyond repair.

Alvin fell.

By now Stephens had regained his balance. With a wordless grunt, he threw himself across the small space and brought his hands down in a clubbing motion on the back of Harbison’s neck.

Late. Too late. One last swing before the hammer went clattering away, and all the sub’s lights, inside and out, were extinguished.

Carrying its lethal cargo with it, Alvin fell, spinning end over end like an out-of-control satellite plunging to earth.

Stephens screamed, a guttural sound swallowed up by the darkness. His body fell away from Harbison and slammed against the far wall. His scream cut off, leaving no echo behind.

Harbison had been ready for the freefall. He clung onto the sub’s ruined controls, put his face up against his porthole, and stared unblinking into the abyss. He felt calm. He’d long accepted that his world would end this way.

A light flared just outside the window. A sudden blue flash illuminated the porthole and let him catch a glimpse of his own face. Then another flare, this one a fiery green, and a third as warm and yellow as the sun.

They accompanied him the whole way down, creatures no one had ever seen before and no one was likely to again. Tracing his path until their beautiful lights merged with the ones inside his skull, and he closed his eyes.