Ocean Black

CHAPTER TEN

Except for Otsuka and Brande, everyone filtering into the wardroom appeared as sleepy as Thomas felt. Larry Emry was rubbing his eyes with gnarled knuckles. His moustache was in disarray. Polodka and Mayberry were arguing about something. As usual, Dokey was the last one to arrive. They should have named him “Pokey” instead of “Okey”.

The two early risers, Otsuka and Brande, were sitting at a pair of the central tables that they had pulled together. He was munching on a thick fried egg sandwich — leaning forward so that it dripped on his plate, but though dripping egg-and-mayonnaise sandwiches were his favorite fast food, he didn’t seem particularly pleased about his world this morning.

Thomas went into the galley, poured herself a tall glass of orange juice from the pitcher in the big refrigerator, turned the spigot on the famous coffee urn — the Orion’s coffee was as strong as antifreeze — for a mug of coffee, then carried both back into the wardroom and sat next to Otsuka.

“You’ve been up most of the night,” she accused Brande.

“Making phone calls,” he said. “Getting people out of bed in Washington. They didn’t want to get out of bed.”

“And?”

“Wait until everyone gets some breakfast.”

Nearly fifteen minutes went by before Dokey emerged from the galley carrying a tray heaped with burritos, pancakes, eggs, and sausage.

“I’m here,” he said. “Let the games proceed.”

Thomas had been watching Brande closely, and she had noted the fire in his eyes. They got that glint when he became overly zealous about some project. He could become totally focused on an objective that no one else saw. Infrequently, when his dander was up, his eyes took on the same quality of hardness. The other giveaway was his mouth. It assumed a straight line that no humor or change of subject could bend.

Brande sipped from his mug — one of Dokey’s, but she couldn’t see the caption from where she sat.

“First,” Brande said, “is something wrong, Svetlana?”

Brande still surprised Thomas at times. He noticed the little things that were going on around him, especially with his people. She had thought him so involved with his inner vision that he’d have missed Svetlana’s debate with Mayberry.

“There is nothing wrong,” Polodka insisted.

“The hell there isn’t,” Mayberry said. “She got a nine hundred dollar phone bill, but she wouldn’t tell me about it until last night.”

“How’d that happen, Svet?” Dokey asked. “You only call me a couple times a month.”

“It is all right,” Polodka said.

“She found herself a nine-hundred number consultant, quote, unquote,” Mayberry said.

Polodka glared at him.

“What kind of consultant?” Emry asked.

“We don’t need to get into that,” Mayberry said. “I told her not to pay it.”

“Give the bill to our lawyer,” Brande said. “We do still have a lawyer, don’t we, Rae?”

She nodded. “Jim Wray. Give me the bill, Svetlana, and I’ll see what we can do about it.”

Thomas doubted that much could be done. “Let the buyer beware,” still prevailed, even though the buyer might not fully understand or appreciate the culture or read the fine print on the TV screen.

Polodka looked a little relieved, and Brande went on, “I talked to Unruh….”

“He’s that CIA guy?” Dokey asked.

“Yeah. I don’t know how he wormed his way into this operation, but apparently he’s fully involved, according to Hampstead. Anyway, Washington is moving at lightning speed on this thing.”

“That means they set up a committee,” Emry said.

“A task force, Larry, a task force. It is, however, a presidential task force, so they should have influence if not warp speed. So far, our orders are to stand by.”

“We could be standing by until March,” Emry told them, “and it might be a cold winter.”

“True. So, while we’re waiting, we want to do a little reconnaissance.”

“What kind of reconnaissance?” Thomas asked. She didn’t want Brande to get carried away, mounting some kind of paramilitary operation. He wasn’t a fanatic about environmental and historical issues; he wouldn’t go so far as to say that artifacts on a sunken ship were fated to stay sunken, though he would say they should be in the proper museums. He had never believed in sabotaging industrialists or spiking trees in a forest to prevent environmental pollution, but she knew he could be very concerned about ecological balances.

“Today, we’ll go look at yesterday’s blast site. I’d like to get a count on the number of floor crawlers or any other vehicles down there.”

“And we stay far away from their subsurface habitat?” she asked.

“Until we learn more about it, like who it belongs to,” Brande said.

“My money’s still on AquaGeo,” Dokey said.

“Larry, you studied the footage,” Brand said. “Find anything relevant?”

Emry nodded and finished chewing a piece of toast. “I think so. Starting with the station itself, I figure it at seventy feet in diameter. It could house about fifteen people on a regular basis. Perhaps a few more. And there’s something you people didn’t see, but that I picked up on the video tape. About a hundred yards from the station, due north, is another pressure hull, maybe twenty feet in diameter. It’s connected to the main station by a thick umbilical cable laid directly on the seabed. I think it’s a nuclear reactor.”

“No lie?” Dokey said.

“No lie, Okey. It’s a convenient and nicely portable source of energy for powering the station and recharging the battery packs for submersibles and floor crawlers.”

“I’ll buy that,” Brande said. “I’ve often thought we should develop something similar for our own use.”

Thomas noticed that Mayberry wrote himself a quick note. She could anticipate that, at the next shore-side meeting, he’d have a proposal for a nuclear reactor power plant. She made her own mental note — somehow, she’d have to come up with the money for it.

Thomas saw that Dokey’s face had tightened up, a sure sign that he also saw nuclear power as a challenge.

“At the top of the station is a large winch and cable reel,” Emry continued. “All I saw was a thin cable headed upward, but I’d suspect it leads to a buoy that is probably retracted beneath the surface until they let it rise. It’ll be their communications link.”

“How about communications?” Brande asked. “You listen to the audio tapes?”

“Bucky and Paco helped me out, there. We didn’t find anything on the recording tapes for the UHF or VHF scanners, but we think they’re using a low-end acoustic transceiver for sub-surface communications and possibly telemetry. The channel is, however, scrambled.”

“Why would they encrypt the dialogue between the station and the vehicles?” Thomas asked.

“Maybe they don’t want to reveal company secrets,” Bob Mayberry put in. “Let’s keep in mind that they can probably hear us, however, on the frequencies we use.”

“They would not be able to read our telemetry, however,” Polodka said. “Our transponders digitize the data utilizing our own codes.”

Polodka and Otsuka had worked out the encoding.

“True,” Brande agreed. “It keeps them from getting readouts on altitude and position directly from DepthFinder. They can’t plot exactly where we are.”

“Which may be,” Mayberry said, “the reason they’ve encrypted their transmissions. If we could tap into their telemetry, we could pretty well follow every sub or crawler they have.”

“Back to the submersible,” Emry said, “It is larger than DepthFinder, but doesn’t have her streamlining. It’s a pressure hull with numerous appendages, but no outer hull. There’s a pair of skids on the bottom, and between the skids is a parking sheath for ROVs. In fact, I’m damned certain that the ROV in place is Sneaky Pete. I’ll vote along with Okey on this outfit being AquaGeo.”

“Told you,” Dokey said.

“What else?” Brande asked.

“The floor crawler. She’s a monster with a sixteen-foot diameter pressure hull. Each track is four feet wide, with steel cleats that are about a foot long. The length of the surface contact for each tread is twenty-five feet, and the treads are twenty feet wide, from side to side. This baby is designed to not tip over when she’s lifting a load. There is one big manipulator arm, capable of, I’d judge, ten tons of lift, and a smaller arm for tool deployment. Both the one you photographed enroute and the one at the station are similar and are well-used, if I go by the scratches and dings. They both had drills mounted on the tool arm, and there were additional drilling rods clipped to the side of the hull. I’d guess they could drill a forty-foot hole.”

“Do you have any ideas about the size of the personnel complement, Larry?” Thomas asked.

“Difficult to tell at this point, Kaylene. If it’s just an exploratory venture, they could get by with minimal manpower. That means four people for the station and two each for the crawlers and the submersible. That’s ten. We don’t know if there are more subs or crawlers around.”

“That’s what we’ll try to determine today,” Brande said. “We’ll dive on Site Number Eight, and then circle it in ever-widening circles, and see if we can’t pinpoint some more of their inventory.”

Following Emry’s recommendation, they had started numbering the locations of the exploratory excavations.

“And who’s going today?” Thomas asked.

“Dokey and….”

“No.”

“What?”

“You two and Bob were down for over twelve hours yesterday. Let’s spread the load.”

“I am well-rested and well-fed, Kaylene,” Dokey said.

“We don’t know what Washington and tomorrow will bring,” she argued.

Brande looked disappointed. When he was on a project, he wanted to do everything himself.

Finally, he said, “I’m afraid you’re probably right, Rae.”

“Not even probably.”

“I haven’t been down in over a year,” Emry said. “I need some sea time.”

“All right, then,” Brande said. “Rae, Svetlana, and Larry get the ride.”

“Who’s in command?” Emry asked.

“Flip a coin,” Brande said.

Svetlana Polodka drew the right-hand seat as pilot, and that pleased her. She did not have many operational hours in DepthFinder, far less than she had in the Neptune class of MVU’s submersibles.

She had bundled herself in two sets of long johns and a jumpsuit, and she carried two sweaters, but she was still cold. A light drizzle was falling from the skies when they boarded the submersible, but the wind, which was gusting to thirty knots, turned it into pelting droplets that stung the face and dampened clothing. By the time they were in their seats, with the hatch closed, the three of them were mildly soggy.

Larry Emry was in the seat behind her. He had in fact won the coin toss, but declined the commander’s seat since, as he said, his submersible skills were a little rusty from lack of use.

With her wrists resting on the padded ledge in front of her, Polodka kept her thumbs and forefingers lightly clamped to the joysticks. The sticks were self-centering, and very little pressure was needed to affect changes in the submersible’s attitude. It was like the power steering on her car, but much more efficient.

The depth readout read 112 feet, and she was already headed into the proper direction. They were not diving directly on the site, but aiming toward it during the descent, like a glider falling.

Mel Sorenson’s voice came over the Loudspeaker acoustic system. “All right, DepthFinder, your sonar tow is deployed. Bon voyage.”

Kaylene Thomas shifted in the seat beside her. “I have Sarscan under control. Take up the slack, Svetlana.”

She used the twin slide switches for trim at the base of the left stick to ease in power on the electric motors, and followed that by trimming the diving planes downward. A few minutes later, she felt the tug as the towline came taut, and cut off the power. They were in free fall, now.

“Great,” Thomas said. “We’re on the way.”

“Orion,” Emry said on the acoustic transmitter, “all systems one hundred percent. We’re going mute.”

Brande had decided, until they knew more about who might be listening to them, to avoid chatter on the communications networks. That order was immediately void when safety was at stake.

Emry put a tape of Frank Sinatra into the cassette deck. Emry was of that era. He talked of “rat packs,” and “chairman of the board,” and other things she didn’t understand. He had told her to rent the video Ocean’s Eleven, which she did, but she still didn’t understand. Robbing a Las Vegas casino seemed to have no relationship to the song, “New York, New York.”

The rate-of-change readout reported that DepthFinder was falling at a rate of one hundred feet per minute. Physically, she was not aware of it, but mentally, she thought of herself as a fallen leaf, wafting downward from the tree. It was much like her dreams of late.

She had talked to the psychic about her dreams of falling, and now, she was very embarrassed about the way in which she had been taken. Ninety-nine cents a minute added up quickly when one did not watch the clock.

Though she was embarrassed, she still worried about her dreams and her sensation of falling.

She shivered.

Svetlana Polodka was cold and falling, and she was uncomfortable.

Her assistant sat across the round table from her and waited while she went over the last geological analyses. Bert Conroy hummed a melody she didn’t know. He probably didn’t know it, either.

Penny Glenn made her decision from the data spread out before her.

“Skip the next test locale, what we were calling G, and go on to the following one. It’s now Test Hole G,” she said. Spinning around in her swivel chair, she pointed to the position on the computer screen map behind her.

Conroy asked, “It’s looking that good to you, Penny?”

She turned back to face him. “Absolutely. If we find what we’re looking for at G, we’ll start mining right away.”

Conroy, who was the head geologist for the station, was an old forty-ish. His hair had grayed prematurely, and combined with the heavy wrinkles in his forehead and at the corners of his eyes, had added five or six years to his chronological age. He was also very conservative.

“I know the signs are good, Penny. I’d even predict as much as a half million tons of manganese out of this site. Still, that’s only breakeven when we compare the cost of deploying the equipment.”

“Ah, Bert, you worry too much. This lode is going to expand, the farther north we go.”

“You’re relying on instinct, Penny.”

“My instincts are pretty good.”

“I know, I know. However, shouldn’t we suspend operations for a few days, until these other people have taken off?”

Glenn had recognized DepthFinder on the video camera when it circled the station. She had been amazed, quite simply, that Dane Brande had located them with such apparent ease.

Then she had been less amazed when she remembered meeting the man and recalled his record of exploration. He was indeed intriguing.

Still, at the time, she had elected to remain silent and not give him any indication that the station was inhabited, or by whom.

And they finally went away, though she was not sure how far away.

The station crew and the vehicle crews had been edgy since the encounter, though. It was disconcerting to find unexpected humans in this environment, much as if Neil Armstrong had lifted a rock on the moon and come face-to-face with a visiting Martian.

“Like us, Bert, Marine Visions has every right to explore where they want to explore. However, we have a schedule to follow.”

“You just skipped a step in the schedule.”

“Because I’m certain of the trend. Don’t argue with me over this.”

“All right, Penny. I’ll send Team Three to the site with a nuclear charge.”

Team Three, headed by Jim Dorsey, was assigned to floor crawler FC-9 and was composed of nuclear experts. They performed all of the drilling, setting of charges, and detonations. The slim, stainless steel canisters that contained the nuclear charges frightened her to some degree, and all twenty-five of the nuclear devices owned by AquaGeo were aboard FC-9. Until they were revamped, they had been 105 millimeter howitzer rounds. Glenn had obtained them from a penniless, ex-East German army officer who was no longer penniless.

“What’s the condition of the others?” she asked, looking up to the bulkhead mounted monitor that was labeled “Status Board.”

“We’ve got Team One on sleep schedule, and Two is still at Test Hole F. Four is enroute back from F.”

“And the subs?”

“B-7 is standing down. B-12 is charging batteries, and B-3 is supervising at Test Hole F.”

She knew them better by their names, Perth, Sydney, and Melbourne.

“Very well. Good. That’s all.”

Conroy went back to work, and Glenn spun around to her console. She flipped the switch for the buoy winch and heard it grinding above her as the cable reeled out and let the antennas rise to the surface. When the light turned green, she picked up the phone and dialed the number for Deride.

It wasn’t a long wait.

“Deride.” Said in the flat, positive tone with which he always answered phone calls. Glenn knew that she herself was a confident person, but she sometimes envied Deride’s super-assurance.

“Uncle Paul, where are you?”

“Hmmm, hello Penny. I guess we’re about a half-hour out of San Francisco. I’m meeting Anthony.”

“You were correct.”

He laughed. “About what.”

“Brande. They found us.”

“What! What do you mean?”

“I mean that DepthFinder paid a call on us.”

“Jesus! They found the station?’

“That’s right. Buzzed us a couple times and then took off. I don’t know where they are now. Our sonar doesn’t quite reach the surface.”

“That’s impossible.”

“If you say so, Uncle Paul.”

There was a long silence while Deride digested the information, then he said, “It doesn’t change a thing.”

“I didn’t think so, either,” she told him. “I’m proceeding with the test schedule. I want you to send me the start-up equipment.”

“I’ve got two diggers, two conveyers, and a separator enroute,” Deride said. “They’re only a couple days out. Two days behind them, we’ll have pumps. In two weeks, we should be transporting ore.”

“Good. We’re starting with Test Hole D. The concentrations are sufficient to assure us a pay-out.”

“Pay-out is my favorite word. One thing, though, Penny. With Brande hanging around, you tell your teams to make certain the area is clear before they detonate. Anthony assures me that our legal status is clear, but an accident might bring investigators.”

“I’ll do that, Uncle Paul,” she said, then broke the connection.

Switching to the scrambled acoustic circuit, she said, “McBride, AG-4.”

Mac McBride was piloting the submersible B-3, Melbourne. He responded immediately. “McBride.”

Because of the combination of acoustic transmission and scrambling, his voice sounded tinny and elevated, as if he had been inhaling helium.

Her voice would sound the same to him, and sometimes it was difficult to tell who was on the other end of a transmission.

“You’re aware of the presence of a Marine Visions submersible?”

“Yeah, Penny, I got that message. What’s going on?”

“I assume they’re interested in our activities, Mac.”

“What do we do about it?”

“Nothing,” she said. “We do what we came to do, and outsiders are to leave us alone.”

The guided missile cruiser California (CGN-36) was returning to her home port after a three-month patrol cruise when the message came in. The signal officer immediately carried the flimsy to the bridge and approached Captain Harris, who was sitting in his chair watching the mooring activity on deck.

“Excuse me, Captain. This seems to be a priority.”

Harris took the single page. “Thank you, Mister Evans.”

Harris reluctantly looked away from the satisfying sight of his crew performing their chores flawlessly and glanced at the message:

After reading the skimpy words from the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, who was Admiral David Potter, twice, Harris looked up and through the windshield at the people waving frantically from the pier, the families eagerly welcoming their men and women home from the sea. It was a large crowd.

And it would be a disappointed one.

Commander George Quicken, his first mate, was supervising the mooring, and he turned away from his post beside the helm when Harris called to him.

“Captain?”

“Read this, Commander.”

Quicken frowned when he was through. “Not very timely, is it, Captain?”

“Not at all. Let’s go to sea, Commander. Mr. Evans, contact the captains of the Mahan and the Fletcher for me, please.”

“You’re sure you got the numbers right, Wilson?” Mark Jacobs asked.

Overton flipped through his notebook and compared the coordinates written there with the readout on the Loran.

“They’re correct, Mark. One thing I always do, I always get my facts straight.”

Jacobs gave him a skeptical look.

“There’d be no reason for the Earthquake Information Center to give me the wrong coordinates.”

Jacobs waved his arm expansively toward the sea outside the windows. For as far as they could see, there was only ocean, and it wasn’t a particularly gentle ocean from Overton’s point of view. He had a sensitive stomach when it came to oceans. Only Jacobs’s seeming unconcern about the height of the waves reassured him.

They were on the bridge of the yacht, and the rain thrummed steadily on the overhead canvas. Both the glass windshields and the plastic side curtains were faintly fogged over. Visibility through them wasn’t all that great, and the overcast skies and rain limited it further, perhaps to two miles, though Overton’s visual perceptions got all screwy when he was the center of nothingness.

With the engines almost at idle, the pitching of the boat was more pronounced, and Overton stayed close to the passenger seat, where he could hang onto its back cushion.

“Brande’s got to be out there somewhere,” Overton said. “I know it.”

“Uh huh.”

Overton showed Jacobs the second of the three sets of coordinates he had gotten from Golden. “Where’s this?”

“North and west.”

“Let’s try there.”

Jacobs leaned toward the Loran and dialed in the numbers. He shoved the throttles forward, and when he engaged the autopilot, the bow of the boat came around a few degrees to the north. It took several minutes to come up to speed, and then the pitching subsided.

Overton felt a little better about it.

“If we don’t find him in the next couple hours, Wilson, we’re going back to San Francisco.”

“We’ll find him,” Overton said.

“It’s a big, big, ocean.”

“I’m going down and call the Earthquake Center. Maybe they know something more.”

They weren’t getting oral reports from the submersible, but the telemetry readouts had been telling the same monotonous story for some time. The life support systems were all operating normally, and reserves were more than adequate. Electrical energy was in good shape. In the last couple hours, the depth had changed only a few hundred feet either way of 18,500 feet as they followed the rise and fall of the seabed. They were on the correct heading and would soon be approaching the site of the seventh detonation.

Brande had often thought that a deep dive was as tough on the support personnel aboard the mother ship as it was on the crew of the submersible. The level of anxiety, anticipating some minor or major mishap or system failure, was high. One waited in silence with crossed mental fingers.

Worse, the monotony of sitting at the command console had given him time to think. He thought about what he had seen the day before, the people he thought were behind it, and what the future days might bring. He thought about the options he had.

And the options he should have.

Swinging around in his chair, he spotted Dokey at one of the other terminals, playing with the instructions for some computer program. It was one of the ways in which he passed time. Otsuka was the same way.

“Okey?”

“Yeah, Chief?”

“You want to take over here for awhile?”

“Sure thing.” Dokey saved whatever it was he was doing and picked up a mug sporting a picture of Neptune’s Daughter. The miniature sub had a frown painted on her face, and she was frantically eluding an amorous whale.

Dokey stood behind him and studied all of the telemetry for a minute, to get his mind wrapped around the current status.

“Okay, got it, Chief. All normal.”

“All normal,” Brande repeated, rising from his chair.

Brande left the command center in the lab and climbed to the bridge where he found Connie Alvarez-Sorenson keeping an eye on both the ship and Fred Boberg.

The bridge had an overhead speaker monitoring the few conversations between the ship and the submersible, but she asked, anyway, “Everything all right, Dane?”

“Right on track, Connie. How about you?”

She smiled. “Despite the weather, we haven’t drifted out of position more than ten or fifteen feet at any one time.”

Brande glanced through the windshield. The wind had picked up, and the spume off the wave tops pelted the hulls of the ship. Whitecaps dotted the ocean’s surface, and the lower levels of the overcast skies rolled and twisted.

“What’s the prognosis,” he asked.

“It’s not going to get better, but I don’t think it’ll get a lot worse in the next twenty-four hours.”

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” he said, heading for the radio shack.

Sanders was on duty.

“Bucky, see if you can’t raise Bull Kontas for me.”

“Coming right up, Chief.”

Sanders used their satellite channel, and it only took about two minutes since Kontas was never far from his pilot house.

Sanders exchanged positions with him, and Brande shut the door behind him and sat in the operator’s chair.

“Good morning, Bull.”

“Hey, Chief.”

“Where are you.”

“Just left the Bay, headed for Ocean Deep.”

“Precious cargo?” Brande asked.

“Buncha crates for some of the sub-contractors.”

“Turn her around and head in, Bull. I want you to pick up some stuff for me.”

“O… kay, Chief. You want it out there?”

Brande gave him the coordinates. “That all right with you, Bull?”

“Damned right. I haven’t been in deep waters in a long time. What’d you need?”

Brande read off the list he had formulated in his mind.

“Jesus, Chief! I know where Gargantua is, but this other crap?”

“I trust to your knowledge of the waterfront, Bull. You know the right kind of people.”

“Maybe. What do you need this for, Chief?”

“I’m preparing for a rainy day. For eventualities that may never come to pass.”

“How much do I spend?”

“Whatever you need to spend. You go see Ingrid for the cash, and tell her to call me if she has any reservations. Don’t tell her what we’re buying.”

“I don’t tell her what I’m spending it on?”

“You and I get along real well, Bull.”

Paul Deride had his shoes off, his feet on the coffee table, a cigar lit, a lead crystal tumbler of Cutty Sark at hand, and a fine view of San Francisco Bay from the living room of the suite in the Fairmont which AquaGeo Limited kept for him.

Anthony Camden had declined the cigar and the drink, and Deride didn’t know whether or not he was enjoying the view.

“You got it down, Anthony?”

“Yes, Paul, I think so. I’ve got my staff preparing the boilerplate now. If anyone makes a squawk, it won’t take long to fill in the particulars and get everything filed.”

“In what courts?” Deride asked.

“It’ll depend on where the squawk comes from. We’ll be ready for anything.”

“Good.”

“Nothing to be nervous about, Paul.”

“I’m not nervous.”

“Are you hungry, then? I haven’t had lunch.”

“Yeah, order something up.”

Camden picked up the phone from the coffee table, called room service, requested petite filets, and while they were waiting for them, the phone rang again.

Deride grabbed it before Camden could reach it.

“Deride.”

“Uncle Paul, there’s been an accident.”