Ocean Black

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The research vessel had her cycloidal propellers extended and was gripping her place on the watery earth with dedicated tenacity. In the cloudy, cold, and damp mist that swirled over the stern deck, Brande and Dokey toured the exterior of the submersible.

DepthFinder wasn’t as pretty as she used to be. The gaping hole in her right side, which had been nearly nine feet wide and six feet high, had been covered, but it had been covered with what they had on hand, which were clear plastic panels. The panels were only 30 mils thick, so they had bonded four layers in place, butting the 3 x 4-foot panels to each other and over-lapping them for strength. The thickness of four sheets created an opacity that prevented a clear view into the hull, though the ragged edges of the covered hole were apparent

Additionally, three twelve-foot-long, three-inch angle irons had been bolted and bonded in place horizontally across the damaged region to provide additional rigidity to the outer hull. The sub’s original sleekness had disappeared in a matter of hours.

Checking to make certain that Thomas wasn’t within earshot of them, Brande told Dokey, “Ingrid wouldn’t approve of this, would she?”

“Hey, Chief, she goes about these things like a damned structural engineer. You and me, we’re from the duct tape generation. Can you imagine a NASCAR stock car race being completed without forty rolls of duct tape?”

They ducked under the bow line and walked around to check the port side.

“If we’re photographed,” Dokey said, “make certain you present your good side to the camera.”

“Will do, Okey.”

The comment made him take a glance at the Arienne. She was still trailing along, though as soon as they had stopped, she had moved closer and was now standing off the stern by about two hundred yards. With the low visibility, he couldn’t identify any of the figures aboard, but he saw shadows moving in the cabin and on the flying bridge. Overton had radioed them half-an-hour earlier, seeking another interview.

Again making sure that Thomas wasn’t close by, Brande asked, “You comfortable with the systems check?”

“Ah, hell yes. Sometimes the technology just gets in the way, Dane. You have to remember what we first started diving with. That was a Model T, compared to the Saturn.”

On the decision to proceed with the dive, he and Dokey had voted Thomas down. They had felt they could get by quite easily without a few of the backup systems and still-cameras they had been unable to repair. The important life-support, control, and propulsion systems were, if not in A-1, at least A-2 condition. Dokey called them A-1b.

With their physical inspection completed, Brande ordered all of the access hatches closed, and the deck crew rushed in to batten them down. They stepped back into the lab to doff their slickers and pull on sweaters.

Otsuka was waiting in the crowd gathered there, already dressed for the dive. Mayberry had wanted the third seat, but Otsuka had forced a coin flip and won.

“Ready, Kim?” Brande asked.

“I still think I got screwed,” Mayberry said. “We’d better flip again.”

“No,” she said. “It is my turn.”

Thomas stood to one side, watching him with disapproval. Brande thought she was going to protest again, but she kept her disenchantment to herself.

He moved over in front of her. “We’ll be back in a few hours, Rae.”

“This isn’t a run to the grocery store.”

“Think of it that way,” he said.

Reluctantly, almost, she took his hand. “If anything at all looks bad, you’ll abort the dive?”

“Of course.”

She squeezed his hand once, and then Brande, Dokey, and Otsuka trotted through the stern doors out into the mist and scampered carefully up the rain-slickened scaffolding, reaching for the submersible’s sail.

Jacobs, along with Overton and everyone else on board, watched from the stern well deck as the submersible was lifted from the deck of the Orion and lowered into the sea. Jacobs held a pair of 7x50 binoculars to his eyes, and when DepthFinder twisted on her suspension line toward him, noted the repairs made to the right side. Even in the dim light of the overcast evening, the sheen of the patch appeared inadequate. Spray quickly coated the lenses and blurred his view.

Debbie Lane noticed the repair, also. “That doesn’t look very professional to me.”

“What? What?” Overton asked.

Jacobs handed him the binoculars, but the sub had already settled into the sea.

He wondered if Lane was thinking along the same lines that he was. He asked, “Debbie?”

“I think it’s strange that they’re diving with an obviously badly damaged submersible,” she said. “We’re pretty sure the depths here are extreme, and therefore, the risks greater. Wilson made a good point, first of all, about diving in this region at this time of year. If, as he suspects, the Navy is involved with this, then someone, somewhere, is worried about something.”

“What would it be?” he asked.

“A nuclear submarine that’s been lost?” she said. “Brande rescued one of those a couple years ago, didn’t he?”

“That was the Los Angeles,” Overton said. “But here, we’ve got all these seismic disturbances. I don’t think it has to do with a sub.”

Overton’s source at the Earthquake Center had given him the coordinates of two more disturbances, but according to the Loran readings, the Marine Visions people were diving in a new location right now. Jacobs felt certain, however, that when they checked Colorado again, they would find that a new disturbance had been recorded.

Freelander suggested, “Maybe it’s a plane that went down. Spy plane with all kinds of secret stuff on it. They’d want it back pretty bad, wouldn’t they?”

“You’d think there’d be a lot of military hanging around if that was the case,” Lane said.

Jacobs looked around at the horizons. His range of visibility was limited to perhaps a mile. “There’s certainly no Navy presence.”

Overton seemed to have not heard him. He had a firm grip on the railing that ran along the stern gunwale. The pitching of the deck had made him a little pasty-faced.

“Brande’s always been good about talking to me in the past,” Overton said. “The fact that he won’t talk now is suspicious in itself.”

Jacobs recalled his earlier conversation with Brande. “I don’t think he lied to me, either. He just didn’t give me everything he knew. We need more information, and we need it right away.”

“I’ll call the Navy,” Overton said. “If I ask a direct question, they’ll have to answer.”

“And then I’ll call Hap Wilson on the Oriental Rose,” Jacobs said. “Hap has some expertise in subsurface issues.”

Avery Hampstead had watched part two of Lonesome Dove, and his dream was pleasantly nostalgic until it was jarred by the clang of the telephone. There shouldn’t be telephones in West Texas.

Muttering to himself, and trying to not wake Alicia, he rolled his legs to the floor and fumbled for the receiver in the blue light of the radio dial on the nightstand.

“Hampstead.”

“Avery, this is Kaylene Thomas.”

“Kaylene.” He forced the sleep out of his voice and eyes. “Is something wrong?”

“No. I needed someone to talk to.”

Hampstead sighed to himself and decided not to tell her that it was after midnight in Maryland.

“Let me get to another phone,” he whispered.

He shoved the telephone under the pillow and walked to the kitchen to pick up.

“I’m here.”

“Sorry for waking you up. I tried to call Adrienne, but she wasn’t back at her hotel, yet.”

Hampstead felt a kinship. Whenever he was troubled, he called Adrienne, too.

“Where’s Dane?”

“They’re about an hour away from reaching Site Number Ten. After they come back up, I want you to talk to him.”

“About what, Kaylene?”

“About Svetlana. I think he’s very angry, deep inside, and I think he might take some unnecessary risks.”

“I don’t know what I could tell him, Kaylene.”

“For one thing, you could tell him that revenge belongs to the Justice Department.”

“Uh….”

“Uh, what, Avery?”

“Well, so far, Justice has declined to act.”

“What!”

“It has something to do with a lack of sufficient evidence,” he said.

“Evidence! Damn it, Avery! I was there. I know. I’m an eye witness, for God’s sake.”

“Well, there’s the matter of intent, Kaylene.”

“Goddamn it, Avery! I know they intended to ram us, and they did.”

“Kaylene, dear, listen. I know….”

She hung up on him.

Leaving Hampstead with the thought that he wasn’t very good at solace, not like Adrienne was. And wondering what might happen if he ended up with a whole bunch of Marine Visions scientists mad at both AquaGeo and their own government. He dialed information and asked for the number of Adrienne’s hotel in Seattle.

“I’ve found a signal,” Otsuka said.

“What kind of signal?” Brande asked her from his place in the left controller seat.

“I was scanning the acoustic spectrum. I’ve located the frequencies on which they’re transmitting, but all both of them are scrambled. However, on another frequency, I also hear a steady Morse code transmission. I think they’ve planted a signal device.”

“Locator beacon,” Dokey said. “I’ll bet it’s a homing device.”

“For construction or mining crews, you think?” Brande asked him.

“You give me the odds, I’ll tell you whether I’d bet on it or not, Chief.”

“I’ll pass, Okey.”

Brande leaned forward to peer through his port. Without Sarscan in tow, they were able to “fly” closer to the bottom terrain. Dokey was piloting, using the forward-scanning sonar and the six-million candlepower floodlights, which gave them about fifty feet of visibility, to warn him of eminent obstructions. The audio output from the sonar was linked into Dokey’s headset.

They were twenty feet off the bottom, following a down-sloping ridge, moving along at nine knots of speed. Under the lights, the seafloor looked barren and lunaresque. The projections of rock created utterly black shadows which would have been excellent hiding spots, if there were any living organisms which wanted to hide from them. At 18,600 feet of depth, though, anything living that was large enough to see would be in a pressure hull.

The whole panorama was stark and gray.

“We should see something in a couple minutes,” Otsuka said. “We’re coming up on the coordinates.”

They had descended from the surface in a wide spiral, finding the bottom several miles east of the location of the seabed disturbance. The compass showed that they were aimed along a 281 degree axis.

“How we doing, systems-wise, love?” Dokey asked.

“Everything in the green. She is staying together quite well,” Otsuka told him.

Brande felt pretty good about the repairs they had made, though he found himself scanning the readouts more frequently than he normally would and eyeing them with suspicion. He felt they were more untrustworthy than they were supposed to be. He felt colder than usual, too.

“What’s the temp, Kim?”

“Balmy, Pacific day, Dane. Thirty-eight degrees, Fahrenheit.”

“I was thinking about shedding a couple of these sweaters.”

“Uh, uh, Chief. No floor shows, please.”

“You can give them to me,” Otsuka told him.

Changing clothes would be awkward. On top of their warming layers, they were each wearing a white anti-radiation suit. The suit was bulky and hampered movement.

Brande glanced at Dokey. His concentration seemed almost total. He was relatively relaxed in the controller’s seat, and his gloved fingers gripped the joysticks with apparent tenderness, but his eyes flicked rapidly between the port view and the sonar readout on the center monitor.

DepthFinder rose and fell with the terrain, a roller coaster going downhill.

Until a tall escarpment abruptly showed itself on the screen, long before they would have had visual contact.

“The top of that thing’s about three hundred feet above us,” Brande said.

“The mother of all obstructions,” Dokey said, but he already had turned left, and hauled the diving planes into the extreme “up” position.

The sub spiraled upward, climbing, and had achieved sufficient altitude by the time Dokey returned to his original heading.

Having topped the blockade, the sonar was able to pick out a moving blob.

“Floor crawler,” Brande said. “I’m going to release the guard dog.”

“Go,” Dokey said.

“Let’s put the hoods on,” he said.

“Sadist.”

The radiation hoods of their suits were made of coated fabric, and they had clear Plexiglas visors, but once in place, peripheral vision was restricted. Brande felt like he was turning his head on a lazy Susan to keep himself aware of the instrumentation and other activities.

Brande had already set the switches for control of Atlas, and he used the left stick to ease in propulsion for the ROV. He flicked on the robot’s video camera and put the image on the left monitor, then turned on Atlas’s floodlights. He had a view of the underside of DepthFinder for a few seconds until the ROV moved out of her sheath and took flight on her own. A quick look at the monitor gauge told him that the tether was unreeling freely behind the robot.

“Find that acoustic channel they’re using for voice, Kim,” he said. “We won’t know what they’re saying, but maybe you can tell if the tempo picks up.”

“I’ve got it,” she said.

Brande’s and Dokey’s headsets were tuned into the ship-to-sub channel on the Loudspeaker system, though they had not utilized them in the last hour. Otsuka was listening in on AquaGeo’s frequency.

“Sonar shows no subs in the area,” Dokey said. “if you don’t count us.”

“I don’t know how many they had available before,” Brande said, “but we know for damned sure that they’re short one, right now.”

Dokey put the bow down, and they glided. A few minutes later, the huge excavation appeared in the ports. Both the left and right edges of the hole were invisible, hidden by the darkness creeping into their lighted field of view. The far side wasn’t yet visible to them, either.

“Larger than the last one,” Dokey said.

“They’re using more horsepower in those nuclear charges,” Otsuka guessed.

“Which is just what we didn’t want them to do,” Brande said. “I wonder if anyone from Washington is actually talking to anyone from AquaGeo.”

“I’d bet it’s still in committee, Chief.”

Dokey sailed over the near-side lip of the excavation, heading directly across it. Several seconds went by before they saw the other side.

And the floor crawler.

It was parked right at the edge, its manipulator arm fully extended as it gathered rock samples, lifting them into a collector basket mounted on the front of the crawler, between the tracks.

If they had been so busy with their chores that they weren’t watching their sonar, the crewmen inside were now aware of them. As he watched, the manipulator arm retracted and the crawler backed quickly away from the lip of the hole, turning away from them.

Dokey went into a right bank, aiming to circle around and come in behind the crawler.

Brande had discussed their tactics on the way down, allowing Otsuka to overhear. He had worried that she might object, but she had wholeheartedly endorsed the strategy Brande and Dokey had devised.

“He’s going to hightail it,” Brande said. “Headed for the garage.”

“The garage is damned far away,” Dokey said, straightening out his sticks and bringing DepthFinder into line directly behind the scampering crawler.

The crawler dodged around a giant outcropping, but returned to a course of 205 degrees.

“His heading is directly toward that sea habitat,” Otsuka said.

“He’s making fourteen knots,” Brande told Dokey. “I’d guess that’s his top end on the level.”

“I can out-drag him.”

The submersible was making sixteen knots, her twin electric motors spinning fast enough to create a whining vibration in the hull.

Brande watched through his port and saw the back end of the crawler drawing closer. It was in silhouette, outlined by the powerful lights on the front end. The view was hypnotic. He felt as if he could reach through the porthole and touch the crawler. Small clouds of silt rose behind each of the massive tracks as they spun their way across the seabed.

And ahead of him by thirty feet, Atlas shot along above the seafloor, responding instantly to the signal inputs of the joysticks.

“He’s watching us,” Dokey said.

On top of the crawler’s spherical hull was a nest of antennas and a remote-controlled video camera. The camera was aimed at them.

“Be careful of the antennas, Dane,” Otsuka cautioned.

“Roger, Kim.”

Brande didn’t intend to damage their communications ability. He wanted them to be able to get a message out. They could send for help, but the message was important, too.

The gap between them closed.

Brande switched his attention to the view on the screen from the ROV. Atlas had closed to within ten feet of the crawler, which was bouncing up and down as it traversed the rugged terrain. On the screen, he watched it jolt into a large depression, and then bounce back out of it. The ROV slid along smoothly behind it, disappearing into the cloud raised by its passage.

The monitor view was hazy for a moment as Atlas passed through the roiling silt. The ROV advanced on the center of the crawler, between the tracks, and the view cleared enough to show him the big induction motors mounted low and behind the crawler’s hull, between the tracks. Each motor drove a transmission attached to it which directed power to each of the tracks.

“See anything vulnerable, Okey?”

After a quick look at his screen, Dokey said, “I’d try for those armored cables coming out of the motors, Chief. You only need one, and he goes in circles forever.”

“We’re going to have to change our design thinking in the future,” Brande said. “We didn’t anticipate trying to maneuver both Atlas and her manipulator arm while on the move.”

“We don’t usually go after moving objects,” Dokey said. “Not too many objects move down here.”

The crawler driver decided to participate in his own destruction. Apparently worried about his exposed rear, he slammed on the brakes and went into a left turn.

Dokey reversed motors so as not to over-shoot him, and Brande turned the ROV to follow the crawler, slowed her to a stop, and shifted his hands to the manipulator controls. On the screen, he saw the arms shoot out directly ahead of the robot, into the field of view of the video camera.

He quickly eased in power, moved the robot ahead, went back to the manipulator, and clamped the thumb-and-two-fingered hand over the thick cable exiting from the left motor. It was only about a two feet long, reaching from the motor into a control box.

With the hand clamped in place, the crawler would never lose him now. As long as Brande wanted, Atlas was now a trailer for the floor crawler. He glanced out the port and saw the crawler’s video camera moving frantically, attempting to angle down, trying to see what was happening.

The crawler driver threw power to the right track, spinning in place, trying to move his own manipulator into position to protect himself.

“Somebody’s talking up a storm on their acoustic channel,” Otsuka reported.

Dokey backed away from the crawler and its flailing manipulator arm, but Atlas hung on to the aft end.

Brande watched his screen and extended the tool hand. It had a cutting torch in place.

He fired the torch.

Reached out, put the flaming torch next to the armored cable, and watched as flexible metal turned molten, superheated, and then froze white in the chill of the sea. Big droplets of shapeless metal dripped slowly out of the camera’s view.

The crawler stopped turning.

The cable parted.

“Good show,” Dokey said.

Brande released the robot’s grip, then backed her away, making certain he kept the ROV clear of the machine’s big manipulator.

The crawler tried to go somewhere. It started and stopped, but only the right track would move, and it spun in place, like a child’s broken toy. And no one was going to get out and change the tires.

“You suppose he’s cussing us, Chief?”

“He would be,” Otsuka said, “if I could interpret the acoustic channel.”

“The best part, Okey, is they’re going to have to bring in support ships and raise him to the surface to make repairs. That takes time.”

“Talk about cost-efficiency,” Dokey said. “These accidents are going to eat into their profit margins.”

“What now?” Otsuka asked.

As an answer, Brande activated his headset. “Larry, you standing by?”

“Got me,” Emry said. “How’s it going?”

“Quite well.”

“See anything interesting?”

“Only that they seem to be using larger explosive devices. they’re leaving bigger holes behind.”

“And more radiation,” Otsuka said after checking the radiometer.

“That’s not good,” Emry said.

“Maybe they’ll change their minds. Anyway, Larry, take a look at your chart.”

“I’m looking.”

“You see a pattern there? In the distance between detonations?”

“I do.”

“Where do you think the next one will take place?”

“Oh. Hold on. I see what you mean.”

A few minutes later, Emry continued, “There’s not an exact spacing, Dane. But if I follow the arc, I would expect to see something happen between eighty and a hundred miles northwest of where you are now.”

“Give me a heading.”

“Ah, Dane, hang on a minute. Someone else wants to get in a word while we’ve got you on the line.”

“What do you think you’re going to do?” Thomas asked.

“Preventative medicine,” he replied.

Before she could respond to that, a new voice broke into the channel. “Brande, what are you doing?”

“Ah, Penny,” he said. “How nice to finally hear from you.”

“What have you done to my crawler?” Glenn asked.

She was furious, and the fury edged her voice.

“Crawler?” Thomas asked.

“I believe,” Brande said, “that the vehicle may have had a malfunction. You ought to send somebody out to check on it, Penny.”

“Damn you! You’re interfering with a legal enterprise, Brande. I want you to stay away from my operations, and I want you to do it, now!”

“It’s a free ocean, Penny.”

Abruptly, she cut off the circuit and turned to Conroy. “What have you got?”

“They lost control of one track, Penny. We’re going to have to send someone out to tow them in. We’ll also have to raise it for repairs, no doubt.”

“Damn, damn, damn!”

The Outer Islands Lady, AquaGeo’s surface maintenance ship was already enroute. She had ordered away from its station off Alaska as soon as she knew they would have to raise the Melbourne to replace the propulsion unit.

Every contact with Brande had resulted in delays. She was losing equipment so fast she’d never complete the program in time.

Time was the problem. She was closing in on Deride’s final solution, and she was going to run out of time before it was achieved.

“What about Sydney, Penny?” Bert Conroy asked. “In another couple of hours, she’ll be ready to supervise Team Three’s placing of charges. I’d better recall her and send her to watch over the crawler.”

Glenn had heard Brande talking to Emry on the Orion. She knew he was going to go searching for Site I.

He might even find it before the charge was set off.

Or just as it was set off.

God, and he was such a find, too.

“Bert, you just let Sydney and FC-9 do what they’re supposed to do.”

“Penny.”

“All right, send Sydney.”

An Airborne Warning and Control (AWACS) aircraft enroute from Japan to Travis Air Force Base had helped them out a little by making an earlier radar contact, and the Orion and some other, smaller vessel had appeared on the California’s radar screens about forty minutes before.

Commander George Quicken, who had the conn, was standing on the port side of the bridge, scanning the angry seas with binoculars.

“There we go, Captain Harris,” he said. “Four points to port.”

Mabry Harris trained his own binoculars in the direction indicated and saw the two vessels. Their navigation lights made it possible to discern them through the scud that clung to the surface of the sea.

“All right, Commander. We’ll want to take up a position south of them.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Mr. Evans,” Harris said.

“Sir.”

“Message to CINCPAC. We have made visual contact with the Orion. Awaiting further instructions.”

Harris didn’t know why he was there, and he wasn’t sure that Commander, Pacific Fleet did, either. Maybe someone in Washington had a clue.

But he doubted it.