Ocean Black

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Okey Dokey had deployed their second Sneaky Pete from the Orion in the search for Svetlana Polodka, but the results were negative. It took too much time to retrieve the cable attached to the first Sneaky Pete. Or which had been attached. The first ROV was gone, cleanly amputated from the cable, and most likely mangled in the propeller housing of the AquaGeo submersible.

No one on board the Orion had worried about AquaGeo’s vehicle. It had slipped off their sonar, headed for the bottom of the ocean.

In the rough seas, it had taken them over two hours to recover both DepthFinder and Sarscan, utilizing every available hand.

Brande was worried about both Thomas and Emry. Rae wouldn’t admit it, but he thought she was suffering from some degree of shock. He had ordered her to bed — orders that she didn’t accept very well, but she went up to the cabin after a short argument. He doubted that she slept much. With his own adrenaline levels, he hadn’t slept at all.

Emry was blaming himself — he should have done this, he should have done that. Brande’s and Dokey’s consolations and rationales didn’t seem to help him at all.

A long, hot shower and a fresh set of clothing had taken care of Brande’s immediate physical needs — the bone-deep cold to which he had subjected himself, but he too felt extreme anguish over Polodka’s loss.

And he couldn’t help but blame AquaGeo.

As well as himself. He should have exerted his macho side and not let the women make the dive.

God, he could have lost Rae.

The more he stewed over it, the higher the rage built. Brande was not quick-tempered, or even one to harbor anger for lengthy periods, but occasionally some inequity or injustice caused him to build a slow head of steam. He didn’t normally share his ire with anyone else. At the moment, he wished that Bull Kontas would move a little faster.

Most of the crew and mission members had spent the night evaluating the damage to DepthFinder, which had been wheeled inside the lab and which dominated the space available.

Brande had spent the night in the wardroom’s first booth, utilizing Emry’s computer terminal to compose reports and angry letters to the Maritime Commission, the United States Department of State, the Coast Guard, and the Australian government. He had been about to ship them off when he re-read them and decided they were first drafts.

He grabbed the phone off the bulkhead.

“Suarez.”

“Paco, get hold of Hampstead for me.”

“Si, jefe.”

When Hampstead came on the line, he said, “You’re damned lucky I came into the office early, Dane.”

“Not so lucky, Avery.”

“Yes. That’s why I came in early. Didn’t sleep too well, either, as a matter of fact. What more have you learned about the collision?”

Brande recounted the events of the previous day.

“Jesus Christ! She’s dead?”

“We haven’t recovered the body.”

“Oh, shit! What about the other sub?”

“We haven’t looked for it. And I’m not going to look for it.”

“It’s evidence, Dane. It’s evidence.”

“To hell with it. I’m going back to that subsurface station and….”

“Ease up, Dane. Tell me what happened again. On the bottom.”

Brande took a deep breath and recalled what Thomas had told him. She had been shaky, and it had taken a while to get it all from her.

“Rae had the command. She was approaching what we’re calling Site Number Eight, the November 17th detonation. They had already recorded heavy traces of radiation, and Rae had both a floor crawler and the other sub on the sonar. Two hundred yards from the site, the AquaGeo sub turned toward them. Larry tried to raise it on the acoustic phone, but didn’t get a response.”

“None?”

“Not verbal. The sub nosed around a little. They looked at each other with the video cameras.”

“Did Kaylene see them? The operators?” Hampstead asked.

“Vaguely, through their ports. Two males, she thought, but she didn’t have a clear view.”

“And then what?”

“The AquaGeo sub went after the tow cable. Rae wasn’t sure what was going on, but she felt the jolt when it hit, and she turned back hard, trying to put slack in the cable. The AquaGeo sub turned into her and slammed into the right side of DepthFinder. Rae immediately dropped the weights and began the ascent.”

“Damn.”

“They tried to stop her, Avery. Chased her most of the way up.”

“You’re sure?”

Brande told him how they had used Sneaky Pete to stop the pursuit.

“We’ve got evidence, Avery. We’ve got the video tape recorded from Sneaky Pete.”

“Which shows that you attacked their sub, right?”

“It also shows that they were in pursuit,” Brande insisted.

“Maybe. For the time being, just keep that tape to yourself, will you?”

“For what reason?”

“I want to check with some of the others involved.”

“Svetlana’s dead, Avery.”

“Christ, Dane, I know that! I’ll get on the horn and get somebody in gear. What else are you doing?”

“I wrote some letters.”

Hampstead was silent for a few minutes, then said, “Hold off on the letters, too. File your required reports about a death at sea with the appropriate agencies. Send me a copy I can give to the task force.”

“I can’t be objective about this, Avery.”

“Try, please. Give me a chance to work out something on this end.”

Brande sighed. “Two more things, Avery.”

“There would be.”

“There was another detonation in late afternoon. Mel got the direction and range pretty well pinpointed with the ship’s sonar.”

“I’ll check with Golden. What else?”

“The Washington Post is here.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Not at all. Wilson Overton is on board a Greenpeace boat a half mile off our starboard.”

“You didn’t talk to him?”

“No. I’ve refused three requests for interviews, but he knows that something is going on. They saw Svetlana fall into the sea, and they saw our rescue efforts. Mark Jacobs brought his boat in close and offered to help.”

“What about the other stuff, the encounter? Does Overton know about it?”

“I don’t think so. It was all subsurface. But if Mark Jacobs learns what’s going on, he could call in some friendly environmentalist buddies, and we might end up in a real brouhaha.”

“This is getting out of hand, Dane.”

“It’s past that,” Brande said.

After he hung up, he called up to the bridge on the intercom.

“Bridge,” Mel Sorenson answered.

“Mel, where are we?”

Sorenson gave him the coordinates. “We’ve been holding station where we picked up DepthFinder.”

“Let’s get on a northwest heading and look for Site Nine, the one you picked up yesterday. Contact Bull Kontas and let him know about our position and course.”

“We’re continuing with this, Dane?”

“If DepthFinder is repairable at sea, I’m damned sure going to find out what’s going on.”

Kaylene Thomas didn’t sleep, though she stayed in her bunk for six hours. When she got up and showered and checked the mirror, she saw the black smudges under her eyes. She had done some crying, too.

There was a void in her life.

She and Polodka had not been particularly close, but they had been friends. She had respected Svetlana’s mind and abilities. Like others, she had been amused and empathetic as she watched the Russian woman learn about western culture. Most of Thomas’s night had been spent with recriminations. If she had exhibited some leadership, told Svetlana to stay put, told Larry to hold on to her, done almost anything….

The tears began to well in her eyes once again. Wiping her eyes with a towel, she dressed in long johns and a jumpsuit. It took a few seconds to locate her running shoes, which she had kicked into two different corners of the cabin. Had he known, the admiral — her father, would have raised hell about the sloppy behavior.

She went down to the wardroom for coffee, stopping on the bridge for long enough to find out that Brande had told Sorenson to get underway. The Orion had her bows into the waves, and the deck felt more stable. It had stopped raining, but in the darkness beyond the windshield, she detected low-hanging clouds that were blotting out the stars.

“The Arienne is still with us, darlin’,” Sorenson pointed out.

She saw the navigation lights off to the starboard by a quarter-mile.

“Reporters are tenacious, Mel.”

“Not to mention Greenpeace people.”

In the wardroom, she found Brande stretched out on one of the bench seats in the first booth, his long legs hanging over the end. He was sound asleep, and she nearly woke him in order to find out what he had been doing all night.

Instead, she filled a mug with coffee and carried it across the corridor to the lab.

The submersible nearly filled the lab. The top of her sail was within six inches of the overhead, and her broad hull didn’t leave much room for people to move between the sub and the computers and workbenches. One had to be careful to dodge the tiedowns; someone was always tripping over them.

She saw that somebody had mopped the deck of the water that had dripped from the sub, and someone else had used a power saw to cut away the ripped fiberglass on the starboard side. She moved around the hull to her left and peered into the exposed cavity.

Dokey was sitting in a castered chair backed up to a computer console, studying the inside of the hull. He didn’t look happy.

“What have we got, Okey?”

He pulled another chair over for her to sit in and turned so that their knees almost touched. He searched her eyes.

“How are you doing, Kaylene?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“That’s what all the old hands say.”

“Really.”

“Just remember that the Fates are involved, love. Not much you can do to change their minds.”

She gave him a weak smile. “I’ll remember.”

“All right, then. Back to your question. We’ve got a mashed submersible, and that pisses me no end.”

“Can we make her operational? And safe?”

“I’ll know in a little while. The main concern is the pressure tank for the oxygen. I’ve got a couple of the guys testing it for integrity right now. It was shoved sideways a couple inches, but I think the oxygen feed problem you encountered had to do with a crimped supply line to the main pressure hull. That, we can replace easily. The tank, we can’t.”

“Batteries?” she asked.

“Not as bad as I thought. The starboard battery tray was mangled, along with the cells of seven batteries. The center tray was bent up a little, and we lost a couple batteries there, too. Mainly, the cable connections were snapped, and that’s why you lost so much of your electrical reserve.”

“I know we’ve got replacements for the batteries. What about the trays?”

“That grad student, Alicia Walters? You ought to see her at work with an acetylene torch. She’s a sculptor.”

“Sculptress.”

“Not in my world,” Dokey said.

Thomas had to grin at him. “Oh, hell! All right.”

“Then, there are the other little things.”

“Such as?”

“The impact must have been a hell of a lot stronger than I imagined. We’ve got some electronic components inside the hull that were damaged by vibration or overloaded when an electrical surge hit. That’s why so many of the circuit breakers tripped. We’re checking out each, and we may not have replacements for everything.”

“We won’t deploy unless every system is perfect, Okey.”

“That’ll be up to Dane, love.”

“Not necessarily,” she insisted.

“Up to Dane and you and me, then.”

“That could come up two votes to one, Okey.”

“That’s the way it might be, yes.”

“Damn it, Ned, that’s all I’ve got for now.”

Overton’s editor said, “An unidentified person fell into the sea and was not rescued. Man or woman, Wilson?”

“I couldn’t tell at that distance.” Overton shifted the phone to his left hand.

“We don’t have much here,” Nelson said. “Try to talk to Brande, again.”

“He’s adamant. No interviews.”

“We can’t go with what we’ve got.”

“You’ve got the fact that MVU is diving on a Pacific site that the Navy’s interested in….”

“From unspecified sources.”

“…and at a time of year that’s not normal for deep submergence expeditions. Plus, there’s the hard data from the Earthquake Center. Brande’s going to have to file a report on the accident with some agency. Send someone out to check on that.”

Overton heard Nelson’s pencil scratching on paper. “What do you think is down there, Wilson?”

“I don’t have the foggiest.”

“It’s too thin. I need a kicker.”

Overton hesitated. “I’ve got one, but I want to save it until I know more.”

“What?”

“The DepthFinder was heavily damaged. When they lifted it out of the water, we saw that the right side was caved in.”

“You get pictures?”

“Not good ones, what with the weather, but yeah, I did.”

“Fax me the pictures.”

Overton hung up and looked over at the banquette. Debbie Lane and Mick Freelander were leaning over a map with Jacobs. Dickie Folger was in the galley making up another big pot of coffee. He made lousy coffee.

Overton crossed the deck uneasily because of the sway and pitch and stood beside the table, gripping its edge and watching them. Lane’s long, dark hair kept falling on the map, and she kept shoving it back over her shoulder. She was pretty good looking, Overton thought, but too intense.

The map had a series of crosses marked on it, derived from the five coordinates that Overton had gotten from the Earthquake Information Center. Looking at them on a map for the first time, Overton was aware of the shallow arc they made.

“That doesn’t happen in nature,” he said.

Jacobs looked up at him. “No, it doesn’t. What do you think, Wilson?”

He slid into the booth next to Lane. “Manmade.”

“But why?” Freelander asked.

“I can’t answer that,” he admitted.

“Here’s something else,” Jacobs said, moving the point of his stubby pencil to a spot on the map north and west of the last “X.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s where we are now. Or were, until the Orion started moving again, and we decided to follow along.”

“That’s only where the submersible surfaced,” Debbie Lane said. “There’s no telling where it first dove.”

“Except,” Jacobs said, moving the pencil northward on his map, “if they went down about here, it would be in line with the arc.”

“You’re saying,” Overton said, “that there’s been another earthquake we don’t know about, and that Brande was investigating it.”

“Perhaps.”

“And these earthquakes are manmade.”

“Perhaps.”

“And that Brande’s sub ran into something he didn’t know was there?”

“Or ran into an earthquake,” Freelander said.

“Or ran into somebody,” Debbie Lane said.

“Have you got the Melbourne back, Penny?” Paul Deride asked. “That’s an expensive piece of machinery.”

“Munro’s still towing it back and is about an hour out,” she told him. “There’s some damage to the bow, the antenna system, and one of the propulsion units, but McBride and his assistant are all right.”

“It’s repairable?”

“Yes, damn it!”

“Well, that’s what counts. Those hummers are too bloody expensive to replace every day.” Deride glanced over at the suite’s dining room table, where Anthony Camden was on another phone. The top of the table was littered with stacks of paper, most of them drafts of legal documents.

“What do we do about Brande?” Glenn asked.

“Nothing. I expect he got the message that he’s not to intrude on our operations.” He put his booted feet up on the coffee table and leaned back on the couch.

“He’s bound to report the incident.”

“So what, Penny? We’re within our rights to protect our site. Hell, for all they know, we could have been planting another explosive charge, and old Mac was warning them off. And if Brande makes a big stink in any of the international organizations, we’ll just sue. We’ve done that before.”

“What if they get some kind of injunction or mount an investigation?”

“You’ve been through this before, Penny. Anthony will have them tied up in court for ten years, and by the time there’s a judgment, we’ll have played out the vein and be on our way. Don’t you worry your sweet head about it.”

“So I can proceed with the program?”

“Certainly. You do what you do best, and Anthony and I will take care of the odds and ends.”

“Then that’s what I’ll do, Uncle Paul.”

Deride thought she sounded awfully relieved. There were still some things she had to learn about dealing with people in business, but she was coming along.

He replaced the receiver in its cradle and got up to refill his coffee cup. Then he sat down at the table opposite Camden and waited for the man to finish his conversation.

When he finally finished talking to Harriet in the Sydney office, Camden hung up and said, “They’re making inquiries about us, Paul.”

“Who are ‘they?’“

“American agencies. The State Department, the Commerce Department, the CIA.”

“CIA? That’s a first.”

“Also, we’ve got a letter requesting information about our activities and intent in the Pacific. That’s from the Vice President’s office.”

“I wouldn’t bother responding,” Deride grinned. “Hell, if they can’t get the President involved, it’s nothing to get excited about.”

“I suspect the State Department will put pressure on the Australian government, too.”

“Big deal. We’re still operating off-shore.”

Camden leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “We can’t stonewall for too long. At some point, we should make our position clear.”

Deride thought about that. “Okay. File for a bloody injunction against Brande. He’s interfering with our work.”

“Good. I’ll do that.”

Now, he was getting some action, if inaction could be considered any movement at all.

Carl Unruh thought it was damned unfortunate that it took a death to do it.

After a dozen phone calls — some people were reluctant to call him back, he had the same task force group gathered in the same conference room at State, and they all looked rather glum after his recitation of the events leading to Svetlana Polodka’s death.

Marlys Anstett’s quizzical eyebrows were raised even higher. “It was a drowning?”

“Prompted by an overtly offensive action that induced a brain concussion,” Unruh told her.

“We’d have a hell of a time proving that, Mr. Unruh, if we don’t even have the body. I don’t see Justice taking a position on this. We will need much more.”

“Well, Jesus H. Christ!”

“The best we can do right off, Carl,” Admiral Ben Delecourt said, “is a show of strength. The California and her escorts will be on the scene shortly. They can watch over any future dives.”

“If Brande can even get his submersible repaired sufficiently to make another dive,” Sam Porter said. “Perhaps the presence of warships is a moot point?”

Unruh wasn’t going to argue with the man from Commerce. If he wanted information from Commerce, he’d ask Hampstead.

“We sent a strongly-worded letter by fax to the AquaGeo offices in Washington and San Francisco, as well as their headquarters in Sydney, over the Vice President’s signature,” Pamela Stroh said. She shook her white tresses sadly. “We haven’t yet received a response.”

“That’s it?”

“These things take time, Mr. Unruh.”

“What about State?” Unruh asked.

“We asked some questions of the Australian foreign affairs department, and they were congenial enough, but they also declined to become involved in entrepreneurial disputes,” Damon Gilliland said.

Gilliland was wearing the same blue wool suit, Unruh noted, but his tie now belonged to a different regiment.

“So,” he said, “in two days, no one has accomplished anything. That about sum it up?”

Delecourt said, “We’ve had more seafloor detonations. Have you been following them?”

“Yes. And there’s now a change in the pattern,” Unruh told him.

“What kind of change?” Anstett wanted to know.

“They’re still following the same trend line, Miss Anstett, but where the first six events took place about thirty to forty miles apart, the last two have been eighty to ninety miles apart.”

“So they’re moving faster,” Delecourt said.

“It looks that way, Ben, yes. From our perspective, it looks more ominous. The Earthquake Center, without wanting attribution, just in case they’re wrong, suggests that a likely trigger area would be in the vicinity of thirty-six degrees, fifty-eight minutes north, one hundred-forty-one degrees, twenty-eight minutes west.”

“Is the energy output for the devices still the same?” Gilliland asked.

“They seem to be larger, perhaps in the ten kiloton range,” Delecourt said. “The Navy intelligence analysts think that they might be going deeper. Whatever they’re looking for may be further down that they expected.”

“Are they actually drilling wells or are they mining?” Porter asked.

“Not on any of the sites Brande has explored,” Unruh said, “beyond the hole they drill for the explosive. He does think they might be going after manganese since the samples he took off the bottom show a strong concentration. If that’s the case, Brande thinks they’ll start with the earlier sites, maybe Site Number Four, bring in their equipment and set up shop. They’ll then continue moving the equipment northeast as they follow the vein.”

“What’s the likelihood of that, Carl?” Delecourt asked.

“One of my people did a world-wide search on AquaGeo ships,” Unruh said. “There are three freighters at sea, out of New Zealand, headed in the right direction. We’re trying to find out if their cargoes might be mining equipment.”

“And this pattern you see,” Anstett said. “What if it continues?”

Unruh looked at his watch. “Let’s see. Today is Wednesday, the nineteenth. On Monday, November twenty-fourth, California goes into the sea.”