Ocean Black

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Two hours before, they had received a coded one-word signal from Emry on the Loudspeaker acoustic voice system. They were not transmitting telemetry data on the system since AquaGeo or even the Navy might pick up on the transmission and because Dokey and Otsuka had requisitioned some of the circuits. It left the command center aboard the ship in the dark as to their condition, and they had agreed to send an hourly report via an oral code word.

Only Thomas, who was wearing a headset, heard the signal from the surface.

She tapped Brande hard on the shoulder. “Larry says ‘barbeque.”

“Barbeque? That means they set off another nuke.”

“Three to go,” Dokey said. “I hope to hell the Navy is keeping track.”

“They can have the U.S. lawyers complain to the AquaGeo lawyers,” Brande had said. “That should stop it.”

Other than that information from the surface, the descent had been uneventful. She was wearing three sweaters and feeling as bulky as a kid about to head out into a wonderful snowstorm. Dokey kept the submersible in a steep glide, aimed in the direction of the sea station. Brande’s Nana Mouskouri cassettes played on the tape deck. Thomas could tell he was in a melancholy mood because he had played “Even Now” three times.

She thought he was thinking of Svetlana, much as she had been. So much potential lost. Thomas knew that Brande had personally called Valeri Dankelov with a private obituary, and she knew that would have been difficult for Brande.

“Position check,” Brande said.

They were relying on the internal INS (Inertial Navigation System) since they had foregone, in favor of stealth and ordnance, the data link to Orion’s connection with the NavStar satellite constellation.

Dokey said, “I’ve got us eighteen nautical miles out, Dane. Still on a heading of two-five-five. Forward momentum reads out at eleven knots.”

Brande had the mapping program up on his monitor, and he keyed the new data in.

“We’re on track,” he said, “but you know we still have some time to change our minds.”

“Second-guessing yourself, Chief?”

“If I don’t do it for myself, someone else will do it for me, Okey.”

“If you’re worrying about me, Dane,” Thomas said, “don’t do it.”

“Kaylene,” Dokey said, “before I forget, I appreciate the position you took back on the ship.”

“You do?” She was halfway surprised.

“Sure. You’re president of the company. You couldn’t do any less.”

In the semi-darkness, she saw Brande turn his head back toward her and smile. He snaked his hand between the seats, found her knee, and squeezed it lightly.

Her residual anger at him dissipated, though her anxiety level didn’t lessen a bit.

Five minutes later, after Nana got through “Danny Boy,” Dokey said, “Chief, I suspect we ought to unleash Gargantua, and make sure we’re talking on the same line.”

“I’m greatly reassured by your confidence in your ROVs, Okey.”

Brande activated his panel, switched the controls to the robot, and flipped on the exterior lights. Through the portholes, Thomas saw the ultra blackness at the end of the visibility range. She had become inured to that nothingness over time.

Brande gripped the joysticks lightly, eased in power, and Gargantua, who was too large for the sheath, and who had been in tow, slowly emerged from under the bow into their field of view. Dokey flicked a switch and put the robot’s camera view on the center monitor.

Trailing the fiber optic tether like a lazy eel, the ROV moved out ahead of them, then turned to face the sub. Brande slipped it into reverse power to keep it backing in position. Retarding the throttle momentarily, he let Gargantua close in on the center port, until they were staring at it from about five feet away. The view under the halogen lights was stark and bright, as if the brightness control on a television set was out of adjustment.

The monstrous robot appeared to be almost an inquisitive sea creature, perhaps a whale. With his floodlights illuminated, he had very bright eyes.

The video view from the ROV gave them a picture of themselves, peering intently from the submersible’s portholes.

Beneath Gargantua’s “chin” was a wire basket used for holding samples or relics from undersea wrecks. It was crammed with the crude packages that Dokey and Otsuka had devised. Each fragmentation grenade had had its pin pulled and replaced with a fusible link attached to a nine-volt battery. Applying power was supposed to melt the fusible link, allowing the grenade to perform the action for which it had been designed. The circuit was controlled by a coded signal from the sub, utilizing revamped circuitry in the telemetry system. The black box Dokey had plugged into the loudspeaker mounted a rotary switch for selecting up to twenty-five grenades whose receivers were controlled by discrete codes, an arming switch, and a pushbutton.

The problem was a matter of selection.

Selecting number nine, if number nine were still in the basket, arming it, and firing it, would blow Gargantua into tiny bits and pieces.

For that reason, the operators had to visually check each “package.” As she watched, Brande activated the manipulator arm. It extended slowly, the reached back underneath the robot. The thumb and fingers parted, reached into the basket, and clamped on one of the packages.

“Light touch here would be nice, Chief.”

“I know I don’t have your sensitivity, Okey.”

The robotics engineer was capable of tying a shoelace neatly or hoisting a full fifty-five gallon drum with the same manipulator.

When the arm pulled out of the basket, Thomas saw that it was gripping the awkward-appearing, plastic tape-wrapped bundle. The handle of the grenade was exposed, and in this case, because of the way Brande had grabbed it, upside down. Each unit contained a grenade, a receiver, a battery, and a magnet. The ROV’s fingers and thumb had been changed out, switched to a reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) set so that the magnet would not adhere to them. A big white vinyl number was glued to each package.

“For our test shot,” Brande said, “I happened to draw number eight from the lottery basket.”

“Looks like an eight to me, too, Chief.”

“Damn, I hope so. You put the numbers on.”

“I tried not to lose track,” Dokey said.

Thomas’s anxiety increased dramatically. She leaned forward between the seats and watched Dokey as he fiddled with the black box resting in his lap. He clicked the rotary dial until he found number eight and lined it up under an arrow etched into the box.

“The next time,” Dokey said, “Kim and I will make this digital.”

“There’s never, never going to be a next time,” Thomas told him.

“Right. I forgot. Okay, number eight.”

“Nine hundred and twenty-five feet above the seabed,” Brande said. “You want me to drop it before you arm it?”

“Damned right. This is all new technology, Chief.”

Brande released the black bundle.

It dropped away slowly, spinning away from their view.

Dokey counted aloud, “Five… four… three… two… one, armed.”

“Didn’t hear anything,” Brande said.

“Good. You’re not supposed to. Five… four… three… two… one, boom!”

The concussion, from probably a hundred yards away, was only enough to slightly rock the sub. Thomas heard a mild thud as the shock wave slapped the sub.

“Registered on the sonar,” Dokey said. “Test one hundred per cent successful.”

“You only get a score of zero or one hundred on this test,” Brande told him, then added, “Damn, Okey. This seems kind of haphazard.”

“It’s definitely a Rube Goldberg getup,” Dokey said. “I hope to hell they all work.”

Which didn’t help Thomas’s anxiety in the least.

Kim Otsuka sat at the computer console next to Emry, who wouldn’t give up his spot, with her feet up on the desktop. She had wrapped an old comforter around her legs.

Some of the crew members and scientific personnel had headed for their bunks, but most were gathered in the lab waiting for something, anything, to happen. An odd collection of chairs drawn from the lab and the wardroom were aligned randomly behind Emry’s command console.

Through the porthole above the console, Otsuka was shocked to suddenly see stars. It was a brief glimpse, then the hole in the cloud cover closed up, and they were gone.

“I wonder if the weather is lifting, finally,” she said to Emry.

“Doubt it, with my luck,” he said. “I’m supposed to be in Tahiti.”

She glanced at his screen. With no telemetry feedback, he seemed like a lost man. He had his map on the screen, and he was adding a dotted line to it for DepthFinder’s projected course. It was mostly guesswork.

“How long, do you think, Larry?”

“I’m estimating them twenty-five nautical at the moment. Couple more hours, Kim.”

She wondered if they had conducted the ordnance test, yet. The more she thought about it, the more she worried. What if she had put the dash under the “nine,” rather than the “six?” Was “sixteen” really “nineteen?”

She couldn’t remember, and it bothered her that such simplistic math was so troublesome when she could remember the exact sequence of numbers in a three-line, fifteen-element computer instruction.

She knew it was just her nerves.

Had to be.

She stared out the porthole, hoping against hope to see more stars.

And the night suddenly erupted in white glare.

“Goddamn!” Emry yelped.

“What’s that!” she echoed.

“The damned California has put her lights on us,” he said, scrambling out of his chair.

“What are they going to see?”

“That’s not the problem, Kim. It’s what they’re not going to see that’s the problem.”

Carl Unruh was on his way to work, sailing along a nicely auto-free George Washington Memorial Parkway in a light snowfall when his cellular phone buzzed.

He figured the news wasn’t going to be good as he searched for the phone with his free right hand, found it, and clicked it on.

“Unruh.”

“Ben Delecourte, Carl.”

“What’s up, Admiral?”

“Not up. Down. I just got word from the California that Brande’s submersible, along with a large robot that was in a cradle, has disappeared from the deck of the Orion.”

“Maybe they pulled it inside?”

“Captain Harris talked to Lawrence Emry, who said he could not tell a lie — the DepthFinder was undergoing tests on its repaired systems.”

“Sounds logical to me, Ben.”

“In the middle of the night, where they are? Damn it, Carl, you know Brande as well as I do. He’s not above telling the Navy, or even the President, to go to hell if they interfere with his concept of what’s right or wrong.”

“Is he wrong on this, Ben? I mean, you and I and Avery put him out there in the first place. Time’s running out.” Unruh took the exit for CIA Headquarters, slowing rapidly as he realized that what looked like clear highway was black ice. His Dodge did a little tango dance which he corrected with his left hand.

“I’m on his side,” Delecourt said, “but there are just a few problems. State and Justice say we do it right, through the courts. Plus, I don’t know what the hell he’s got planned. I hate it when I don’t have all the data.”

“If we continue to follow the lawyers’ advice, Ben, we’d better notify the Governor of California to start evacuating the state.”

“Isn’t Justice cracking down on Deride?”

“I talked to a couple FBI supervisors last night,” Unruh said. “Sure, they’re trying to pressure Deride, but both of them told me it would be weeks before they sifted through all of the paperwork. And they both expect Anthony Camden and his legal staff to be filing counterclaims against the government this morning, or at least on Monday. No one’s heard directly from Deride.”

“So what do you suggest, Carl?”

“Me?” Unruh asked as he showed his ID to a guard and pulled into his parking lot. “I’m thinking of taking a couple days vacation.”

“And let Brande go?”

“You told me he’s already gone.”

“The President has told me to uphold the law,” Delecourt said. “I’ve got to order the California to protect AquaGeo’s assets against anything Brande might do.”

“All you can protect are the surface ships, Ben. You haven’t got anything in your inventory that will reach the submersible.”

“If he comes shallow enough, we could put a couple Asrocs into him.”

Unruh didn’t think that two or three anti-submarine rocket torpedoes would deter Brande very much. The man was amazingly resilient.

He pulled into his slot, slapped the gearshift into park, but left the engine running for the heat.

“Tell me something, Admiral. If you were in Deride’s chair, and you saw the whole damned American government mad at you, turning your American assets upside down looking for incriminating evidence, threatening your income, would you persist in blowing a few more test holes?”

“If it were my money, I sure as hell wouldn’t, Carl. What are you saying?”

“I think there’s another motive,” Unruh said. “We were quick to attribute it to Deride’s natural greed, but if that were the case, to protect what he’s already got, he should suspend the Pacific operations. He doesn’t appear to be doing so.”

The Chief of Naval Operations thought that over. “You think maybe he’s looking specifically for an earthquake trigger?”

“I spent last night poring over the papers from his previous lawsuits. A hell of a lot of them involved litigation with California companies. What if he just decided to dump all those bastards in the ocean?”

“That’s weak motivation,” Delecourt said.

“I’m looking for anything beyond greed. Look at that pattern of detonations, Admiral.”

Again Delecourt paused, probably trying to refresh his mind. “No one really knows where a trigger might be, or if there is one, beyond an educated guess. Do you think he’s just walking across the sea bottom, hoping to hit it?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Unruh confessed. “If that’s the case, I don’t think he’s thought out the backlash. If he were successful, accidentally or not, I think he could be banned by the business and industry community. No one would buy from him. He’d be persona non grata in practically every country in the world. He initiates an earthquake along the West Coast, and he’s dead meat.”

“In the meantime, what do we do?”

“I’m beginning to think that, sometimes, no decision is the best decision,” Unruh said. “Let Brande go. Hell, for all we know, Ben, the next nuke sets off the chain reaction.”

Wilson Overton wasn’t sleeping well.

He wasn’t much of a sailor, he knew, and the tossing of the yacht kept him awake as much as did his continual review of the success of his story.

He thoroughly enjoyed writing articles that had impact that inspired people to action. It meant that he had influence in his world. The stuff that Thomas had given him — Paul Deride’s use of nuclear explosives, the alleged attacks against Marine visions, the man’s disregard for ecology and the environment, the possibility of initiating massive earth tremors, and the way he hid behind the law — was the kind of thing that spurred people to action.

And things were happening. People were yelling, especially those who lived along the San Andreas fault. A protest of some sort was scheduled for this afternoon in Sacramento. And while the governments — both federal and California — appeared stalemated, his feedback from Washington had indicated that the Justice Department was at least investigating Deride and AquaGeo. Last night, three boats out of Seattle had joined up with them. A crowd was gathering.

The only drawback, as far as Overton was concerned, was his entrapment. He wasn’t in his normal habitat, and he couldn’t chase down Washington bigwigs for their “no comments.” And though he was on the scene, Brande and Captain Harris on the California had all denied him interviews. Thomas wasn’t going to tell him anything more.

The bunk heaved under him, and he rolled onto his side and pulled the pillow over his head. There was just the smallest inkling that his stomach might rebel.

On second thought, he tossed the pillow aside and sat up. If he kept his stomach lower than his head, he might keep it under control.

He became aware of a light rapping on the louvered door of his small cabin.

“Yes?”

The door eased open, and Debbie Lane poked her head inside.

Well.

His successes were mounting.

“Wilson,” she said, “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“I was just lying here, thinking about you.”

“Mark wants you to come topside.” She backed away and closed the door.

Oh.

Overton slipped out of his bunk and pulled on his pants and shirt. He had to turn on the overhead light to find his shoes and socks.

The salon was darkened when he went through it to the ladder to the bridge. Climbing quickly, he emerged on the flying bridge to find Jacobs, Freelander, and Lane. They were all scanning the ocean through the windshield.

“Is something wrong, Mark?” he asked.

“The California is gone.”

“Gone?”

“Just disappeared, along with the destroyers.”

“What about the Orion?”

Jacobs pointed to a blob in the night. “Still there. So is the tugboat.”

“You think something’s happened?” Overton asked.

“If not, it’s about to happen.”

“We’ve probably been in their sonar range for about fifteen minutes,” Dokey said.

“They should have the red carpet rolled out soon, then,” Brande told him.

“I’ll give you this,” Dokey said, “you’ve got her down in the carpet.”

Brande and Dokey had switched jobs, and Brande was flying DepthFinder less than twenty-five feet off the seafloor. The forward-looking sonar picture was displayed on the center screen, with Thomas monitoring it closely. The left screen held the imagery captured by the submersible’s video camera, and the right CRT, which Dokey refused to look away from, was the view seen by Gargantua, some two hundred feet ahead of them as an advance guard. Both the sub and the ROV had about fifty feet of visibility under each set of floodlights.

The seabed was relatively level here with only mild rises and falls, probably the reason that Deride had selected the area as his base of operations.

“More tracks,” Dokey said.

Brande glanced at the starboard monitor. A pair of floor crawler tracks had appeared in the robot’s camera-view.

“Busy place,” Brande said.

At five miles out from the station, they had started seeing the tracks more and more frequently. They testified to the use the crawlers were getting.

“Oooops,” Dokey said. “I got a little close. The seabed’s climbing, Chief.”

“Gotcha.”

Brande eased back on the right control stick and followed the terrain as it increased altitude.

“Let’s back off on the speed, Okey.”

“Six knots good by you?”

“Seems prudent.”

Together, they reduced speed from the ten knots they had been holding for both vehicles.

Through the porthole, Brande’s view was of rock sentinels and heavily-silted sea bottom. Another set of tracks, this one older judging by the way the ocean current had drifted silt into it.

Then two more tracks, converging on each other, and following the direction they were heading.

“Another set of tracks,” Dokey said. “This is turning into a regular Chisholm Trail.”

Abruptly, the seabed leveled again.

“I’ve got them on the sonar,” Thomas said.

Brande looked at the waterfall display. As soon as they had topped the ridge, the sonar had found what they were looking for. The station was apparent on the screen, balanced on its thin legs.

“Two subs,” Thomas said, “and three floor crawlers.”

“I don’t suppose,” Dokey said, “you’d want to circle around and sneak in from the backside.”

“Is there a backside, Okey?”

“As soon as we came out of the sonar shadow, they picked us up,” Thomas said.

“You sure?” Dokey said.

“I’m sure. They’re coming after us.”