Ocean Black

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A short nap was all it took to revive Penny Glenn physically. She had a small, spartan cubicle of her own on the bunkhouse deck, barely five feet by six feet, and when she rolled her legs out of the bed, they almost hit the opposite wall. She got up, donned heavy undergarments and a jumpsuit in the cramped space with awkward familiarity, made the bed to military standards, and went down the corridor to use the communal bathroom.

She wasn’t exactly revived mentally. The decision — made by Deride — to eliminate Dane Brande had both relieved and repulsed her. On one side of that issue, she would be allowed to complete her program without interference. On the other side, there was no reason now to visit San Diego — she could order the Phantom Lode back to Hawaii. She was afraid that that was going to be her loss. She had never before had the feeling, as she had with Brande, that something positive could come out of a relationship. She was deeply saddened.

Trying to set aside those feelings for the time being, she descended the spiral staircase to the main deck, got coffee and a danish from the galley counter, and carried them into the control room.

“Good morning, Uncle Paul.”

He was sitting at the big table in the center of the room, surrounded by reams of report folders and geologic samples tagged in plastic bags. They were heaped in untidy arrays all around him. He had a plastic coffee pitcher and a mug in front of him, and she could see the stains where coffee had been spilled on the table top and a few of the papers.

Two technicians were manning two of the consoles, and she automatically checked the status monitor which told her where all of the undersea vehicles were located. They were about where she expected them to be. The technicians went about their chores quietly and competently. If they had reservations about the events of the last few days, they weren’t saying much about them. In fact, she thought, there wouldn’t be one employee on AquaGeo payrolls who would voice a complaint about Dane Brande or Marine Visions. Because of the harsh environment in which they worked, they were all hard and tough men, and they were paid exceptionally well. To them, Brande had only been an impediment to payday.

“Hello, Penny.” Deride’s smile was dour.

“You’ve been reviewing the reports, I see.” She sat down opposite him.

“Yes, I have. They don’t bloody well tell me what they’ve been telling you.”

She wasn’t too worried about that. Beyond the amateur sense, he was not a geologist.

“Oh? In what way, Uncle Paul?”

“Test Hole D, where we’re deploying a half-billion dollars of equipment? This report says the manganese content in the ore is less than five per cent.”

She took the page from him, turned it around, and glanced at the heading.

“Because, Uncle Paul, you’re reading the assay from the seabed surface. The report from the bottom of the test hole is significantly different. That is, after all, why we dug the test hole.”

“Ah, I see. Well, I’m not too good at this crap, Penny. That’s why I have you.”

She smiled at him. The truth, of course, was that the bottom of the hole tested out almost exactly the same as the surface of the hole.

“How much longer is the testing going to go on?” Deride asked her.

“We’re close to the end of the blasting phase,” she said. “Four more to go.”

She dug through two of the stacks of paper before she found what she was looking for. He had completely messed up her paper organization, and probably, when she went to check on them, her files. He was better on a drilling rig or in an office making decisions. When he got his hands into areas he didn’t understand, chaos resulted.

“Here.” She handed him the revised blast schedule, which she had practically memorized.

“So,” he said, “four more to go after today.”

“That’s correct. We’ll be doing Test Hole J in the morning.”

“Well, that should get some people off our back, we get finished with the blasting.”

“Have you talked to Anthony?”

“Yes. There’s been no response from anyone relative to the court filings. And the injunction is a bit of a moot point, now, wouldn’t you say?”

She felt a tiny stab, a pinprick, to her heart. “I suppose so.”

“The most important thing, Anthony says, is that we had the injunction on record before Marine Visions barged in on our operation.”

Marine Visions?

She hadn’t been thinking in terms of the company as an entity, only of Dane Brande. There was every chance in the world that he hadn’t been piloting DepthFinder himself. It could have been anyone.

Perhaps Kaylene Thomas.

Penny Glenn felt much better.

Mark Jacobs had spent the morning on the flying bridge, alternating with Freelander, Lane, and Folger on the helm, staying close to the Orion. It was something of a relief to get away from Overton for awhile; he had been uncommunicative since returning from the research ship. He had told Jacobs he could read it after he had written it up.

And he had been banging away on a typewriter in the salon all morning.

About nine o’clock, the Orion had taken off like a bat out of hell, and Jacobs had engaged his own propellers, slammed the throttles to the forward stops, and pursued. He wasn’t alone, the American warships were right with them, as well as the tugboat that had shown yesterday.

It wasn’t raining anymore, but visibility was still limited to about a mile by fog and overcast, and the seas were running at around ten feet. Several times, he had lost sight of his quarry, panicked a little, then found her again.

A couple times, when he had gone below for coffee, Overton had complained about the stability of the yacht; he was having difficulty typing. At Jacob’s suggestion that he phone it in, he had bristled. This was his story, he was writing it his way, and he would fax it.

Freelander was at the helm now, and they were making small talk when the Orion suddenly cut power.

“Hey, Mark, back off,” he said.

Freelander eased off the throttles.

It appeared as if everyone on board the research ship was now on the deck. They were standing on all sides, and there were people on the bridge extensions as well as two standing atop the bridge, hanging onto antennas. They were all scanning the ocean in forward and to their sides. Many of the observers clutched binoculars to their eyes.

“Debbie,” he said, “go down and get Overton.”

A few minutes later, Overton climbed from the ladder hatch and said, “What’s going on?”

“You tell me.” Jacobs pointed toward the Orion.

“Jesus. They lost something.”

“The submersible,” Jacobs said.

“In these seas, she’s going to be awfully hard to spot,” Lane said.

“I’d guess they don’t have radio contact with the sub,” Jacobs said. “Mark, let’s go right and put on some power. Debbie, get everyone up here to help look.”

Before she had a chance to go below, the radio sounded off on channel nine.

“Orion, this is the California.”

A few seconds elapsed.

“California, Orion here. Captain Mel Sorenson.”

“Captain Sorenson, I am Captain Mabry Harris. We have your submersible on our radar. Your heading three-four-one, two-and-a-half miles.”

“Captain Harris, I am much obliged.”

“Is she in trouble?” Harris asked.

“We don’t know, Captain. We lost voice contact several hours ago.”

“We wish you well, and if you need assistance, call on this channel.”

“Thanks, Captain.”

The Orion got underway again.

“Hit it, Mark,” Jacobs said.

In the pitching of the sea, they were almost on top of the Orion, fifty yards off her starboard side, when they finally spotted the sub.

Freelander eased off the power as the research vessel closed on the submersible. Taking a look through the starboard windows, Jacobs saw that the Navy ship was still with them. A group of officers stood out on their port bridge wing, brandishing binoculars.

The sub disappeared, dropping low in a trough.

When she reappeared, riding the crest of a wave, there was a figure standing in the enclosure of the sail.

“That’s Brande,” Overton said.

Brande waved lazily at the Orion and gave a thumb’s-up signal.

The people crowding the deck cheered loud enough to be heard across the wind-swept gap between the vessels.

“What the hell is going on?” Jacobs asked Overton.

“It’s a long story. Come on downstairs and I’ll let you read it.”

“Below, Wilson.”

“What?”

“We go below, not downstairs.”

“Whatever.”

Angie poked her head through his open doorway.

“You find Unruh yet?” Hampstead asked.

“I’ve left messages everywhere, boss. He’s bound to run into one of them sometime.”

“Okay, go on home.”

“Night-night.”

Hampstead called Alicia and told her he would be late, then frustrated, he looked up the number in the government directory and called Pam Stroh at Justice.

She was in.

“Miss Stroh, I’m Avery Hampstead, in the Commerce Department.”

“Yes, Mr. Unruh has mentioned your name. What can I do for you, Mr. Hampstead?”

“I’ve tried to reach Carl, but in lieu of finding him, I thought I’d better call you. We’ve got a bit of a situation with Brande.”

“Describe it to me, please.”

Unruh had characterized her to Hampstead as a shaggy dog, but she sounded fairly alert to Hampstead. He gave her the gist of the report he had had from Brande.

“What? Are you saying they set off an atomic bomb on the DepthFinder?”

“It’s not a bomb, Ms. Stroh. But Brande is certain that the people in the floor crawler would have had the sub on their sonar. They knew well what they were doing.”

“You’re telling me it was attempted murder.”

“Yes, I guess I’m telling you that.”

“Brande wasn’t supposed to be there,” she said. “There’s the injunction.”

“Brande didn’t know about it.”

“Oh, damn. I’ve got to talk to some people.”

She hung up on him.

After he had called Hampstead, and after they spent several hours assessing the damage to DepthFinder — Brande especially recalled Dokey’s contorted position on the floor as he repaired a damaged electrical circuit for the lithium hydroxide blower, Kaylene Thomas had ordered Brande, Otsuka, and Dokey into hot showers, so Brande figured she had overruled Sorenson’s time limit ordinance, and he took a five-minute shower. It felt damned good.

He emerged to find her waiting for him with a salami sandwich on rye and a tall mug of hot chocolate.

“Drink this,” she ordered.

He drank it down.

“Eat this.”

He took a bite out of the sandwich. “You know just what I need, don’t you?”

“You need some common sense.”

“I thought I was pretty common.”

He settled naked onto the bed, and Thomas sat beside him, snuggled up against him as he finished his sandwich.

“You also need sleep,” she said.

“We’ve got a lot of work….”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ve been enjoined from further dives.”

He pulled his head back and turned it to look her fully in the eyes. “Tell me about it.”

She related what Hampstead had told her of AquaGeo’s injunction.

“What the hell’s going on, Rae?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking about it, Dane, but the only motive I can read into it is greed.”

“It’s got to go beyond that.”

“Perhaps not. Deride has a timetable, and if we interfere with it, it costs him money.”

“He could damned well wait a few days. He could talk to people.”

“And have some international organization eventually stop his use of nuclear charges? That costs him more money,” she said. “It might be enough to close down his project.”

“I don’t know why he’s so bent on making all of these tests,” Brande told her. “He hasn’t even started mining the sites we’ve seen.”

“That we know of.”

“True. Maybe we should go back and check the earlier sites.”

“We’re not going anywhere. Except back to San Diego, maybe.”

He didn’t feel like arguing with her. Not for the moment, anyway.

Thomas said, “Deride has a reputation for this kind of strategy, you know?”

“What kind of strategy?”

“He ties his opponents up in court cases that last years, milks the resources he’s after, then settles out of court, if at all.”

“Where did you learn that?”

“Unruh told Hampstead.”

“Unruh, huh?”

Brande didn’t have a high opinion of Carl Unruh as a result of some of the decisions that had been made during the Russian missile crisis, when he had first learned of the CIA man’s existence.

He finished his salami.

Thomas stood up and slipped out of her jumpsuit.

“What are you doing?”

“Helping you sleep.”

“I need all the help I can get.”

He slid back on the bed, shunted the blanket and top sheet aside, and made room for her. Neither Brande nor Thomas slept right away.

After they made love, Brande held her close to him, her head on his arm, and twirled a lock of her blonde hair with his forefinger.

“You worry me, sometimes,” she said. “A lot of the time, actually.”

“Not intended, love.”

“I know. But you get so intent on a project that other things — like me — get pigeon-holed.”

“May I remind you that that trait is part of your psyche, also?”

“Maybe,” she said, wincing at the criticism, “but it’s not so pronounced.”

“All right, hon, I promise….”

The intercom buzzed, and when Brande got up to answer it, he found Emry on the other end.

“Dane, I made the projections you asked for.”

“What did you come up with, Larry?”

“My best guess — and it’s only a guess, but it coincides with the best guess of the seismic people at Golden and Scripps — is that a trigger could be found in the area of thirty-six degrees, fifty-eight minutes north, one-forty-one degrees, twenty-eight minutes west.”

“And where are they now?”

“At the rate they’re going, and with the current spacing of test shots, four more will do it. Call it the twenty-fourth of November.”

“Monday.”

“Monday’s the day.”

Rear Admiral David Potter, CINCPAC, finally came through with a TOP SECRET message for Mabry Harris. The captain of the missile cruiser could imagine that David Potter had had some long and involved telephone discussions with Admiral Benjamin Delecourt, the CNO.

The long message outlined the concerns of several government agencies with seabed disturbances, the contracting of Marine Visions to investigate them, the probable discovery that AquaGeo was behind them, and the subsequent injunction against Marine Visions against interfering with AquaGeo operations.

Harris read the message in his cabin, and then used the intercom to summon Commander Quicken.

When he arrived, Harris waved him to a seat on the bunk and handed him the three-page message.

“Read that, George.”

Quicken took his time going through the pages. “So that’s what it’s about.”

“I suspect we were sent to intimidate any interference by AquaGeo vessels with Brande’s examination of the bottom. No one seemed to think it would go beyond that.”

“Except that, AquaGeo’s presence must be all subsurface, sir. We can’t very well intimidate people who don’t even know we’re here.”

“That’s very likely true, George.”

“It also explains the presence of the Greenpeace people. However they got wind of it, they’re not apt to take kindly to radiation poisoning of the sea.”

“I can’t say that I don’t agree wholeheartedly with them,” Harris said.

“And in the meantime, AquaGeo went to court. So, what do we do, Captain?”

“Just as it says there, George. We stand by. We don’t allow Brande to deploy the sub again.”

“And if Brande ignores us?”

“Why don’t you give him a call? Let’s make certain we’re all operating by the same rules.”

“May I be sympathetic to his cause, sir?”

“Yes. But be firm, will you, George?”

Carl Unruh and his peers in the operations, science, and administrative directorates had been tied up most of the day in a long meeting with the Director of Central Intelligence and his executive director. They ate dinner amid a flood of paper, and with all of the issues facing the agency, the problem in the Pacific was only summarized briefly for the others by Unruh. No one, much less the DCI, Mark Stebbins, bothered going into depth on it.

When he got back to his office, he found another flood of paper, most of it telephone messages from Hampstead. Tossing his coat on the sofa, he leafed through the rest of the call-back slips while dialing Hampstead.

“You’re putting in awfully long hours for a commerce person, Avery.”

“Where in the hell have you been?”

“This is Washington, remember? Where else but committee meetings?”

“That’s right, of course. Look, if this were LBJ’s time, we’d be saying the war is escalating.”

“What happened?”

Hampstead told him about DepthFinder’s encounter with a nuclear blast.

“Jesus, Avery! Are they all right?”

“So far as I know. A lot of the electronics on the sub were damaged, but her hull is fine. I talked to your gal Stroh a couple hours ago, and she called back, let’s see, twenty minutes ago. Justice is spending the night preparing a stack of briefs, and in the morning, they’re sending out a platoon of lawyers to counter AquaGeo’s legal claims. The first thing will be to lift the injunction. Plus, she hinted at some other tactics they have in mind, but she wouldn’t elaborate.”

“I’ll bet the Oval Office is now involved,” Unruh said.

“That was my thought, also. The Vice President probably got through. However, Carl, all of this court action may not be soon enough.”

“I know. Monday, the twenty-fourth.”

“Not only that,” Hampstead said. “You know Brande. The guy’s had one of his people die — however that might have occurred, and he’s just been socked by a nuke. I suspect he won’t wait around for the niceties to be finalized.”

Unruh thought about that. Brande did have a proclivity for ignoring the regulations when he thought ethics, morality, or justice were being subverted by the unscrupulous in this world. The fact that he was usually right didn’t enter into it, when bureaucracies were involved.

“Let me hunt down Delecourt and see what the Navy’s up to, Carl.”

“Then call me back, will you? I hate being left in the dark.”

“You’re not the only one.”

Delecourt was at his home in Virginia, the duty officer at the Pentagon told him, and Unruh reached him there.

“Yeah,” Delecourt said, “I heard about Brande’s intimate knowledge of nuclear events from Pam Stroh. The California got a reading on it, and after analysis, our people judge it at twelve kilotons of output.”

“That’s getting too damned big, Ben.”

“A typical tactical nuke is twenty kilotons.”

“Want to make a little wager, Ben? That the next one will be larger yet?”

“My betting money is already in Las Vegas, Carl.”

“What else are you doing?”

“We were trying to be circumspect about this, but I finally had CINCPAC give Harris all the details.”

“Who’s Harris?”

“Commander of the California. Mabry Harris. Another thing, I put a P-3 Orion up, and I’ve got them orbiting the area. The weather’s not too hot, and they’re high, but they have reported activity at Site Number Four.”

“What kind of activity?”

“Three large ships have maintained station there for about the last ten hours.”

“Do your analysts say anything about that?”

“We’ll do a flyover at first light in the morning, Carl, but the estimate suggests that they’re delivering mining or drilling equipment.”

“So, Deride’s starting mining operations on the southern end?”

“While continuing to blow up the northern end,” Delecourt said. “However, it all indicates that he intends to follow through with his mining. That might stand him in good stead in any hearing.”

“Shit. Can we stop the mining or drilling?”

“On what grounds? He’s legal all the way, Carl. And we’re at a standstill because of the injunction.”

“Let’s put the evil eye on him.”

“I could,” Delecourt said, “send the destroyer Maher south to watch the freighters. I don’t think it would do any good, however.”

“Probably not. Anything else I should know?”

“I don’t think… oh, you know about the environmental activists?”

“No.”

“There’s twenty-seven yachts, tugboats, houseboats, and rowboats on their way to the scene. They’ll be a few hours out, yet.”

“Damn. That’s a replay of the Russian thing.”

“Think on the positive side, Carl. They may be able to do more than we’re doing.”

Wilson Overton had faxed his story to Washington in mid-afternoon, and Ned Nelson had faxed back a simple statement: “Hot damn!”

Nelson had also confirmed that Brande’s outfit was under contract to the Department of Commerce, and that the Navy was involved in some way. Both confirmations supported, and gave independent collaboration to claims Overton made in the article. Nelson was trying to run down a rumor that the CIA was involved, and he had put two reporters to work checking the backgrounds of high-level AquaGeo people.

Overton was seated in the banquette in the salon with Jacobs, Freelander, and Lane. Lane had cut her hair; it now only fell halfway down her back, and Overton thought it looked much better.

“You’d think a floating palace like this would have some Scotch hidden somewhere,” Overton said.

“We don’t drink at sea,” Jacobs told him.

“You read my story. Don’t you think that’s worth celebrating?”

“You might celebrate, Wilson. It’s rather discouraging to us,” Jacobs said.

“I’m trying to help you. Look at the PR you’ll get when that bomb hits tomorrow.”

Jacobs smiled. “One, then. Debbie, do you want to see what you can find.”

Lane got up, found bourbon and Scotch in a lower cabinet in the galley, got some ice from the refrigerator, and poured out four drinks for them.

Overton sipped his, knowing he was going to nurse it for a long time. Jacobs could be stingy.

“Can you believe that?” he asked. “Intentionally irradiating the ocean? Emphasis on ‘intentional’.”

“I believe,” Jacobs said, “that you’re finally coming around to our way of thinking, Wilson.”

“Hey, Mark, I’ve never been too far away from it. We’ll get the bastards,” Overton promised.