Ocean Black

CHAPTER THREE

Avery Hampstead had landed at Denver International Airport late in the afternoon the previous day, so he had rented a car and then checked into a Holiday Inn off Interstate 25. He had a leisurely dinner of Rocky Mountain Oysters, imported from Bruce’s Bar in Severance, Colorado. The deep fried bull’s testicles lived up to their international reputation for excellence, and he recalled reading a piece of trivia: The entrance to Severance had a sign reading, “Where the geese fly, and the bulls cry.”

The area was known for its fine goose hunting, also.

After dinner, he had a glass of Chablis in the lounge and listened to Lannie Garrett. Despite his lack of company, he had an enjoyable evening.

And he felt a little guilty about it. The taxpayers were footing the bill.

So he rose at six in the morning to put in a couple extra hours for the taxpayers. After his wakeup call, he had breakfast in the coffee shop, tossed his carryall in the rented car, and drove west on Interstate 70 until a sign told him that it was time to turn off the freeway. He drove slowly into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, enjoying the scenery. The south sides of the mountains, protected from sunlight, still had traces of the last snow clinging stubbornly to cold ground.

He was early enough to take a spin around the Coors brewery to examine the basis of that fortune and still be present when the doors opened at the National Center for Earthquake Information. Dr. Emmett Schaefer was waiting for him.

Shaefer was a shock haired, tiny bit of energy. His eyelids and his hands moved in rapid flutters. Hampstead had the feeling that almost everyone around the man, Hampstead especially, was slowing him down.

They introduced themselves to each other, and Shaefer found them cups of coffee. Hampstead didn’t think the man needed stimulants beyond what was self generated.

In Shaefer’s office, which was a jumble of charts, diagrams, and printouts, the seismologist directed him to a chair at a small conference table.

“Are you familiar with our operations, Mr. Undersecretary?”

“Let’s speed things up, Doctor. I can get by on Avery, rather than a title, and yes, I know that you monitor disturbances in the earth’s crust. Every time we have an earthquake in California, the media flock here to interview the experts.”

“Would you like to see the monitoring room?”

“I think I’ve seen it on TV.”

Shaefer smiled a thin smile and spread a long sheet of paper out on the table top. Hampstead recognized it as the paper fed from a roll through the automatic ink pens that provided a graphic record of one thing or another. By his eye, the squiggle of ink lines that worked their way down the center of the paper appeared consistent.

Shaefer unrolled two more long sheets, and then aligned the three sheets on the table.

“We have an anomaly,” he said, “which we could have lived with. In fact, however, we have three of them, and that’s what makes them out of the ordinary.”

He ran his forefinger along the squiggle on one sheet and tapped a neatly clipped fingernail against the dried ink.

Hampstead leaned forward and stared at the indicated point. It didn’t appear much different to him. The points of several lines were perhaps a couple millimeters out of line with the other points.

“And here,” Shaefer said.

He tapped the next sheet.

“And here.”

“Yes, I see that, Doctor. What do you suppose it means?”

“This first one occurred six hundred and twenty two miles off the coast. It measured one point two on the Richter scale. Nothing to be concerned about, really. There’s a small fracture zone in the area. It could have been simply a mild shift. It happens all the time.”

“Uh huh,” Hampstead said to fill in the gap of silence when Shaefer looked up at him.

“Then, some twenty seven hours later, and thirty miles farther to the west, there was another disturbance, this one measuring one point one.”

“Aftershock?” Hampstead asked, trying to be knowledgeable.

“No, no. It’s in what we believe to be completely another structure.”

“Believe to be?”

“It is nearly twenty thousand feet below the surface. The area hasn’t been fully explored.”

“I see.”

“The third movement occurred thirty two hours after the second, some thirty miles northwest.”

“I see,” Hampstead said again. “It’s moving away from the coast.”

“Yes. That appears to be the case.” Shaefer abruptly stood up, un-collapsed a collapsible pointer, and moved to a chart on the wall. The head of the chart said “Pacific Ocean Floor,” and Hampstead recognized a few of the seabed features from the charts he used himself.

“In the grander scheme of things,” Shaefer said, “The disturbances are located between the Murray Fracture Zone on the south, here, and the Pioneer Fracture Zone on the north.”

The two zones were formed along east west lines, their ends abutting the North American Continent. The Pioneer Zone was some three hundred miles north of San Francisco, and the Murray Zone petered out offshore directly west of Los Angeles.

Shaefer continued, “The pattern….”

“Three events lead you to a pattern, Doctor?”

“Perhaps. We shall see. In any case, I believe a pattern is developing, with the events moving to the northwest, approaching the Pioneer Fracture Zone.”

“All right. I see the picture you’re painting, Doctor. You want a closer look.”

“Exactly.”

“And, at those depths, only deep diving submersibles will do the job.”

“Which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has at its disposal,” Shaefer said.

“It’s not quite that easy,” Hampstead told him. “Every vessel in the inventory is currently on assignment, and most of them are in southern waters at this time of year. Perhaps in the spring….”

“The spring! Look, Mr. Und… look, Avery. This could be catastrophic. It can’t wait for spring!”

“You’re pretty certain of yourself,” Hampstead said.

“Certainty is relative in this profession. Let’s say I’m concerned enough that I think a closer surveillance is warranted.”

How in the hell do I sell that to my boss? Hampstead wondered.

“You mentioned catastrophic?”

“Should this pattern continue, in a curving line leading to the north, it would intersect some sensitive structures in the Pioneer Fracture Zone.”

“All right.”

“If a major event took place in the Zone, there might well be subsequent shifts in faults that we should not like to see.”

“Faults such as?”

“The San Andreas Fault,” Shaefer said.

“Right down the state of California.”

“Exactly.”

“The Big One,” Hampstead said.

“Not a precise title, but the connotations are well publicized.”

“What would cause these disturbances?” Hampstead asked. “Doesn’t Mother Nature kind of balance herself?”

His casual use of “Mother Nature,” didn’t impress the scientist.

“I thought I was clear on that, Avery. I don’t believe these are natural at all. Very certainly, they are manmade.”

Paul Deride was a “hands on” businessman. He was not content sitting at a desk, watching the numbers change. He frequently circled the globe, checking personally on the hundreds of operations taking place within the twenty four separate companies that comprised AquaGeo Limited.

Some of the sites were difficult to reach, especially since in the last decade, most of his projects had moved offshore. The AquaGeo navy that supported his operations had grown to immense proportions for a private owner. Discounting the smaller craft, there were fifty three major vessels under ownership or lease by several of his companies.

Deride travelled alone, as he usually did. Outside of his attorney or his chief geologist, who might accompany him from time to time, he had no desire for a coterie of attendants and assistants. If he had dictation for one of the seven secretaries that served him world wide, he had a telephone.

This morning, he flew aboard one of his own aircraft, a Canadair CL 215 normally utilized for transferring work crews. It was a reliable amphibian, powered by twin 2100 horsepower Pratt and Whitney radial engines. While the airplane could carry twenty six passengers, he was the sole occupant of the cabin. The two pilots and the flight engineer were partitioned off from him.

When he heard the throb of the engines decrease and felt the airplane bank to the right, Deride sat up in his seat and peered through the window next to him. As the plane circled, he saw only the sun reflecting off minor whitecaps on the blue sea. Then he saw the conning tower of a gray submarine. Two men standing atop it waved at his plane.

The pilot leveled out, flew east a few miles, and then turned back to the west. The seat belt sign flashed on, but there were no oral reminders over the public address system. The pilot knew that Deride detested receiving anything that sounded anything like an order.

His seat belt was already fastened, but he tightened it another inch. Through the window, he could see the ocean surface rising toward him. It was a calm day, the seas running perhaps two or three feet in elongated swells. There were no clouds in his sky.

The engines idled, and the hull of the amphibian touched a wave top, and then skidded into the sea. He saw the outboard pontoon dip downward, jetting white foam and water behind it. The hull sang with the vibrations of friction and the creaks of joints.

The Canadair slowed rapidly, rising and falling with the sea, and the engines picked up tempo again as the pilot closed on the submarine.

Deride released his belt and stood up. He was wearing rubber soled deck shoes, chinos, and a short sleeved tan safari shirt, his typical uniform. He found it preferable, and certainly more practical, to the suits he was compelled to wear when interacting with other businesses.

With a wide stance, he maintained his balance on the pitching deck of the cabin. Picking up his briefcase from the empty seat next to his, he walked forward to meet the flight engineer who emerged from the cockpit to open the port hatch.

The engine died on that side as the tang of salt air poured into the cabin. The starboard engine idled back, then also died. The Canadair would float about on the surface until he was ready to return.

A yellow rubber dinghy dispatched from the submarine appeared outside the hatch, and Deride stepped through the hatchway and down into it. The dingy rose and fell with the waves, and maintaining his balance was difficult. He sat down on thwart in the bow.

“Good morning, sir,” the helmsman said.

“Morning. Let’s go.”

The small outboard motor shrieked, and the dinghy backed away from the amphibian. Two minutes later, Deride was aboard the submarine. His bulk was a challenge for the deck hatch, but he descended the ladder with practiced familiarity. The captain, a man named Keller, met him.

“Good morning, Mr. Deride.”

“Captain. How’s the timing?”

“Very good, sir. The first barge is loaded, and the second is prepared for transfer.”

“Let’s get down there, then.”

Deride followed the captain forward to the control room. Like others in the fleet, the Troubadour was constructed along the lines of the US Navy’s Skipjack class submarines. At 3100 tons of surface displacement, it was 250 feet long with a beam of thirty four feet. There was no armament, of course, and the crew complement was minimal at seventeen. The nuclear reactor was modeled on the S5W2, powering two De Laval steam turbines. Two propeller shafts could raise her speed to thirty knots, but speed was not her purpose.

The Troubadour was a tow boat.

The spartan control room was manned by five people, all of whom had gained subsurface experience in one navy or another around the world. Whatever the nationality of his employees, Deride expected them to speak, or to learn, English. He did not have time, personally, to bother with other languages.

As soon as the crewmen aft reported that the dinghy was aboard and the hatch secured, Captain Keller said, “First Officer, take her down. All ahead one third. We want twelve hundred feet and a heading of two four five.”

“Aye aye, sir,” the first mate responded.

As the submarine submerged, the rolling motion created by the waves disappeared.

Deride felt the loss.

He was totally claustrophobic. Being confined in a steel can beneath an oppressive and frequently angry sea stirred heavy fears in him, probably the only fears he had ever acknowledged to himself. The irony was that so much of what he had achieved was created out of an environment which frightened him almost irrationally.

He always told himself it was irrational, and he faced the challenge each time with intrepidation and stoic silence. He would not let the fear best him, and he would never tell another about it.

As the deck inclined by about ten degrees, he stepped aft to watch at the video console. Cameras secured at various spots on the submarine’s hull fed their image to six monitors on the console. The forward camera captured only bluish green water, seemingly without life, and dimming rapidly as they descended. The aft camera’s image was marred by a white flurry created by churning propellers. A school of silvery blue fish was caught briefly in the view from the port camera.

The two screens which displayed images from the remotely controlled cameras mounted on the conning tower were currently dark.

“Depth, sir!” called the planesman, and the deck began to level.

The man tending the video console activated the movable cameras.

Two dark blobs appeared in the forward view screen.

“All stop,” Keller ordered.

“Aye aye, sir. All stop.”

The propellers stopped spinning, but the submarine continued to coast forward, closing on the blobs, which evolved into dark gray, cylindrical capsules.

Exactly like the capsules that contained cold medicine, Deride thought. He had never taken a drug or an aspirin in his life voluntarily. Only the governmental requirements for visas or ingress to a country had forced him to keep his vaccinations current.

These capsules, however, contained something far more valuable than amphetemines. They could be engorged with sixty thousand barrels of crude oil. The bullet nose housed pumps for egesting ballast as oil was sucked aboard. The exchange was carefully controlled by a computer so as to maintain the proper neutral buoyancy of the capsules.

The second capsule was connected to the first by a thirty foot long steel cable, and both capsules had four tiny fins on the aft ends, to stabilize their flight through the water.

Each capsule was, simply, a barge. Neither had motive power. Propulsion was provided by the submarine, which would tow these barges to an offshore pipeline near Equador.

Once the submarine train was underway, it could maintain eighteen knots of speed, and unlike surface tankers, it was not affected by the weather or sea conditions. While AquaGeo also kept a surface tanker fleet, the submarine transports proved fast and invaluable, and the sub-trains were gaining dominance in the fleet.

The sub-surface freighters were especially valuable when loading or unloading in privacy was desirable.

Keller ordered engines astern briefly to halt their forward movement.

The console operator increased the magnification on one of the cameras, focusing in on a small submarine. Deride likened them to worker bees. Large enough to embark three men, the miniature submarines were used for drudge work and were not named. As he watched, this one rose from the seabed several hundred feet below, trailing an eight inch-diameter hose. The other end of the hose was connected to the pumping station on the sea floor which gathered the output from six wells. All of them had been drilled nearly four years before, and all of them continued to produce copious amounts of crude oil.

His startup costs on these subsurface wells had been enormous, but more importantly, Deride did not have direct or indirect, general or limited, partners. Drilled outside of any nation’s territorial waters, he paid no land leases, no royalties, and no royalty overrides to another living soul. When the oil was sold in relative privacy, as this batch would be, he also paid no taxes to any government. Compared to his land based oil production, the offshore wells produced more than three times the income.

Payback on the drilling costs came three times faster.

The rest was gravy.

Keller came back to stand alongside him. The captain had watched this operation many hundreds of times, but part of his well paid job was to humor the boss, though not too obviously.

“Mechaum,” Keller said to the console operator, “let’s monitor the audio channel.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

He flicked a switch, and the dialogue between this worker submarine and another one operating the pumping station came over the speaker. The acoustic telephone gave voices a hollow quality.

“How you doing, Snake?” the submarine on the seabed asked.

“Another five minutes, Gorgi. Let’s not rush it.”

Time was money, but Deride refrained from saying anything about it. His head felt compressed, and the old, standard headache was coming back. It always went away when he returned to the surface.

Deride had grown up in oil fields. From his teenage years to his mid-twenties, he had worked as roustabout, roughneck, and tool pusher. He had worked the deck in snowstorms and blazing heat, and he had enjoyed every minute of it. This remote control manipulation of the earth’s treasures was not as enticing, but it was the way of technology, and he was astute enough to use the technology.

On the primary video screen, assisted by the halogen light cast by the camera’s floodlamps, he saw the small sub approach the second barge. It slowed, moving gently, its manipulator arm reaching forward to plug the hose connection into the barge’s receptacle.

“Got it, Snake?”

“Hold on a….”

Abruptly, a cloud of blue black spurted from the incomplete connection.

“Goddamn it, Gorgi!” Snake yelled. “Shut her down!”

The oil ceased to flow, but Deride watched the cloud of escaped crude slowly rise above the barge and disappear into higher waters. He estimated that four barrels about 176 gallons had been released. It would rise to the surface and create a small slick.

He was not concerned about that. If it was spotted, someone would attribute it to the offshore wells near Santa Barbara.

He turned to Keller. “Captain, you will see to it that Gorgi Whatever his name might be is charged for four barrels of crude at the spot market rate.”

“Of course, Mr. Deride.”

Harbor One, at six hundred feet of depth, where the light of the sun was almost totally diminished, was one of Svetlana Polodka’s favorite places on earth.

Her favorite place also was America, generically, and California, specifically. From the day she had arrived in San Diego to complete postgraduate work at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, she had been enamored of America and all that it meant. After she joined Marine Visions, Dane Brande had periodically assured that her and ‘Valeri Dankelov’s visas were extended whenever they came due. She and ‘Valeri had enjoyed a brief affair, but he was a true Russian, homesick, and he had returned to the rodina, the motherland.

Polodka carried a Russian surname, but not many of the other Russian stereotypical traits. She was barely five feet tall, petite, and with curves that ‘Valeri had modestly called “exponential.” Dark haired and dark eyed, she did not try to emphasize either with elaborate hair styling or makeup. Like the other women of MVU, she was so often in the sun or in the water that the expenditures would have been wasted.

She was a computer software engineer for MVU, with a special interest in fiber optics, and when Brande had told her that he wanted her to stay as long as she wanted, she had applied for American citizenship. Dankelov, she thought, had been dismayed at that news, hoping to rekindle their relationship, but he was tied to St. Petersburg, and she had new ties.

The special bond was Harbor One.

The prototype for Ocean Deep, it was emplaced on steel pillars eighty feet above the seabed, and the inverted bowl design had a diameter of one hundred feet. The lowest deck of three decks within the bowl contained engineering spaces, including the highly important electrolysis components which extracted oxygen from sea water for the atmosphere. Chemical filters cleaned the air, and a very efficient distilling plant provided pure drinking water.

The atmospheric and water generation units, in addition to the turbine farm on the seabed which produced electricity from ocean currents, made the sea laboratory nearly self sufficient, which was Brande’s eventual goal. He had shunned the thought of bringing electrical power from the mainland to the station via cable.

As it was, even with the recent installation of an additional turbine generator, the electrical heat tapes applied around the dome only kept the temperature at sixty five degrees. It was never comfortably warm, and the silica gel filters and high pressure of the atmosphere could not quite cope with the interior moisture.

Polodka did not mind. The whole concept was too fascinating to worry about the mundane details.

In the drive toward the eventual self sufficiency of Harbor One, as well as toward developing new products to ease world demands for food and energy, two smaller domes had been constructed to the northwest, both within a quarter mile. The mining project and the agricultural project domes were linked to Harbor One by Kevlar shielded cables and tubing providing them with electrical power and communications. Each of the dependent domes did have their own atmospheric and water distillation plants.

On the engineering deck in the main dome were a dozen doorless cubicles in which resident or visiting MVU staff members worked, and where Polodka and Robert Mayberry now worked at side by side computers.

There was also a large reception chamber on the main deck which doubled as a workshop, with tools and benches lining two of the fiberglass walls. An airlock large enough to accept a mini sub or the larger robots was also located in the reception chamber.

“Damn!” Mayberry said.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“We’ve almost missed our coffee break, Svet. Come on, let’s get a move on.”

Robert Mayberry, who was Director of Electronic Technology, uncoiled from his armless castered chair. He was over six feet tall and so thin that Dokey called him, “Shadowless.” His ash blond hair was unruly, and unnoticed, as far as Mayberry was concerned.

They left the lab they were using and climbed the spiral staircase to the second deck where the residential, recreational, sanitary, and eating facilities were located. The aluminum railing felt cool and sweaty under her hand.

“Tea or coffee?” Mayberry asked as they stepped into the self serve kitchen.

“Hot chocolate, please, Robert.”

Polodka had been working in the United States for over six years now, and she was still not accustomed to the largesse in foodstuffs. In Russia, she had never had to watch her weight; here, she was almost grateful that she feared blossoming into a 150 pound gorilla. But she adored chocolate.

They went back to the stairs and climbed to the top deck. It was an open space laboratory, with dozens of experiments underway in hydroponic tanks, pressure chambers, and controlled sea water chambers. Sensors and computers monitored biological, psychological, engineering, and oceanographic projects. Seventeen people, supported by federal and state funding through universities around the United States, were currently in residence. Additionally, seven full time MVU people maintained the dome and conducted company-sponsored probes into undersea life.

The top deck, some twenty feet below the highest point of the dome, was a working environment rather than a tourist attraction, but Polodka always enjoyed it anyway. The view was almost unobstructed for 360 degrees. Only the rib and crossbar structural members of the curved clear acrylic dome detracted from the sensation that the viewer was one with the sea.

Little of the exterior could be seen at the moment since the exterior lights were extinguished and the interior lights were at full brilliance. Above, through the bluish gray light, she could see Charlie, the bluefin tuna that had adopted the colony, making his rounds.

To the south, she saw the anchor point and thick umbilical of the Kevlar shielded fiber optic cable that rose to the buoy on the surface. She had designed the computer interfaces for the fiber optics, an achievement that gave her some pride.

In the very center of the deck was a large round conference table surrounded by a dozen castered chairs. It was used for the impromptu scientific debriefings when the experts in residence shared their progress, failures, and successes with their colleagues.

Andy Colgate, who had taken over as Director of Harbor One when Kaylene Thomas became president of the company, was already there, nursing a big mug of coffee.

Mayberry pulled out chairs for them and they sat down. Charlie stopped his pacing and took up a station where he could keep an eye on them.

“Have you found my problem yet?” Colgate asked.

“We’ve narrowed it down,” Mayberry said. “It’s somewhere between the antenna buoy and the engineering deck.”

“Gee, thanks, Bob. You’re a big help.”

“Do not look so crestfallen, Andy,” she said. “We have also determined that the fiber optic system is not at fault.”

“You’re only saying that because it’s your system,” Mayberry said.

“I am not.”

“Don’t be so literal, Svet. I’m teasing.”

“It is difficult to tell with you, Robert.”

“Actually, Andy,” Mayberry said, “our best guess right now is the secondary data relay. I’ll open it up in a little while and take a look for salt.”

“The damned maintenance is going to overwhelm us,” Colgate said.

Mechanical and electrical systems subjected to the sea environment, whether on the surface or below it, were always sensitive to moisture and salt. Though every primary component was normally contained within a sealed compartment, the insidious fingers of the sea seemed to find their way within, depositing corrosive elements which eventually brought on system failures.

Because of it, and because of Dane Brande’s almost obsessive insistence on safety, all communication and life support systems had redundancy built in. Additionally, most systems had monitoring devices of some kind. In the current problem, a backup system for transferring data between the mainland and the dome had begun to act up, occasionally spitting out gibberish.

“The more complicated we get,” Mayberry said, “the more likely we’ll have a failure now and then. I don’t think we’re going to get around the maintenance chore, Andy.”

“If you two were any kind of engineers at all, you’d make the systems simpler,” Colgate said. “Fewer components, fewer problems.”

“That is funny,” Polodka said. “My psychic consultant said I should make my life simpler.”

“Your what!” Mayberry said. His mouth had dropped in total surprise.

“My consultant,” she backed off.

“Yeah, I heard that part. What kind of consultant?”

“Uh, psychic.”

“Where’d you find him?”

“Her.”

“Where’d you find her?”

“I called this eight hundred number….”

“Svet, my love. You and I have to have a long talk.”

“After you fix my data relay,” Colgate said.

“Talk about what?” she asked.

“About consultants.”

“Why? It helps to talk sometimes.”

“Sure, but have you seen your telephone bill yet?”

“No. Is there a problem?”

“Not until you get the bill.”

Mark Jacobs slid out of his cab and entered the Sir Francis Drake precisely fifteen minutes before the luncheon was to begin. He prided himself on his punctuality.

He felt a little uncomfortable in a suit and tie. For all he knew, he was five or ten years out of style. Accustomed to Levis and nylon windbreakers, he didn’t keep up with GQ, and he had no desire to start doing so.

Jacobs captained the Arienne, a sixty eight foot Bertram cruiser whose hull sides were festooned with the swooping rainbow stripes and large green lettering of “GREENPEACE.” He was also proud of the role he was playing in the service of mankind.

A Frenchman by virtue of his mother’s heritage, Jacobs had grown up in the south of France and had obtained a degree from the Sorbonne in international law. Now in his early forties, he had never practiced law, but his knowledge of it, combined with the substantial trust fund settled on him by his American father, served him well. The income from his trust allowed him to call the Arienne his own boat.

His ancestry was apparent in his dark coloring, his very white and even teeth, and his tightly curled black hair. One unruly forelock dripped over his smooth brow. He was a careful estimator of probabilities, and when he mounted a commando style assault on environmental polluters, the odds were that he would come out of the confrontation with a successful attraction of media attention on, not only himself, but the ecological felonies being perpetrated by the industries he hated.

His media generated persona had evolved to the point where he was constantly being invited to address groups such as the one today, the Northern California Sierra Club. He never turned down such invitations if they fit into his schedule because he was ever prepared to discuss the impending environmental death of the planet and to offer his solutions toward countering the threat.

He just hated dressing up to do it.

He also found himself disenchanted with some kinds of people, the ones who were willing to talk about the problem from sunup to sundown, but unwilling to take personal, effective action. Still, those people quite often donated to the cause, sometimes substantially, and he was careful to not antagonize anyone.

Inside the front entrance of the hotel, Jacobs paused to orient himself. He was looking for an announcement board pinpointing the meeting room when a man in a three piece blue suit and paisley tie approached him.

“Mr. Jacobs, I’m Dave Argosy.”

They shook hands.

“How extemporaneous are you, Mr. Jacobs?”

Jacobs raised an eyebrow. “Do you want to change my topic?”

“If you prefer to speak on sewage dumping, that will be fine,” Argosy said. “But we just got word about an oil spill in the North Sea.”

“My favorite subject,” Jacobs told him.

Orion appeared ungainly out of her habitat. Because of her twin hulls, she was perched on a dual set of cradles at the end of the slipway. Out of the water, she seemed taller than one would expect, and Brande had the disconcerting notion that a mild wind would topple her from her roost.

Like her sister research ship, Gemini, which plied the Caribbean and Atlantic, the 240 foot Orion was the result of Brande’s design. The foredecks of the twin hulls were short, and the main deck stopped short of the end of the twin sterns, creating a space between the hulls for deploying and recovering submersibles.

The interior of each of the hulls was large enough to provide cabin accommodations for the normal crew of sixteen plus a couple extra beds when necessary. The main deck superstructure contained the large laboratory, fitted with workbenches, test equipment, and computers. It could be accessed by a large, centered door from the stern deck, by side hatches, and by a hatchway into a forward cross corridor. On the other side of the corridor, on the bow end of the superstructure, was located the combination galley/ward room/lounge.

The top deck contained the bridge, the sonar and radar spaces, the captain’s and executive officer’s accommodations, and four small guest cabins. The exposed deck behind the cabins was dominated by two Boston Whaler type boats. A mind numbing array of antennas topped the bridge, the result of Brande’s shopping sprees.

Rae Thomas called him incorrigible when it came to electronic gadgets and wizardry. The radio compartments of the Orion and the Gemini had been spacious in the design stage. Now they were cramped because the bulkheads were hung with radios spanning low to very high frequencies, satellite communications transmitters and receivers, ship to shore sets, and acoustic transceivers. There were tape recording decks and computers. The compact disk players delivered music throughout the ship. CD ROM’s (Compact Disc Read Only Memory) gave instant access to encyclopedias, almanacs, atlases, and other research materials. Telex and facsimile machines required their own space. The overflow of navigation system black boxes which would take up too much room in the chart/sonar/radar compartment were also bolted to the radio shack’s bulkheads.

Thomas complained about the cost, but that didn’t stop Brande from poring through the catalogs and picking up the phone while digging for his credit card.

The cost of this overhaul was going to run to about a hundred thousand dollars, and Brande expected to hear from Thomas about that, also.

He walked slowly beneath the hulls, examining the fresh white paint and the dark red anti fouling coats that had been applied to the hulls.

Connie Alvarez Sorenson walked with him. She was first mate and executive officer of the ship, as well as the wife of the captain, Mel Sorenson. A dusky and tiny beauty, she could match sea developed vocabularies with any sailor in the Western Hemisphere. Bull Kontas had given up trying to impress her with his knowledge of curses.

“They’ve done a nice job, Dane.”

“Looks that way,” he agreed.

“Once the cycloidals are finished, probably tomorrow, we can put her back in the water to finish the topside chores.”

“You’re in a hurry, Connie?”

“She belongs in the water.”

“True.”

Brande ducked his head to peer up through one of the open panels in the hull. The flush panels could be retracted, allowing the cycloidal propellers, which appeared to be giant egg beaters, to extend downward. Modeled on the propulsion system used by the oceanographic research vessel Knorr, the four propellers fore and aft on each hull were linked to the two diesel engines and controlled by computer. The helmsman could dance the ship forward, aft, sideways, or in circles with precision. Using the NavStar Global Positioning Satellite system as the navigation aid, the computer could maintain the Orion’s almost exact position in both calm and heavy seas.

In the hull cavity above him, Brande noted the absence of the propeller.

“We didn’t lose it, I hope.”

“No way,” Alvarez Sorenson said. “They’re straightening a couple dings while it’s out for the bearing replacement.”

He backed out from under the hull and looked up again at the gleaming white paint. The superstructure still required repainting of its coat of white and its diagonal yellow stripe.

She was still a beautiful ship, despite her stubby look and her functional hatches and cranes the submersible lift was a gigantic yoke spanning the distance between the stern hulls. He was proud of his ownership, though less impressed with his $28,000 a month finance payments for both ships.

That number seemed high, but was considerably less than the $232,000 a month spent on crew salaries, maintenance, and supplies. Brande used to think it was less, but Rae Thomas, who had a way with numbers, was getting a better grasp on the allocation of costs.

“So, how much longer do you think, Connie?”

“Back in the water the day after tomorrow, so we can stop paying the slipway charges….”

“You’re getting to be just like Rae.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” she said. “Then, we’re looking at another two weeks for the topsides finish and the systems maintenance.”

“Two weeks.”

“Right. Have you got something lined up for us?”

“Adrienne might have a project, if we can get right on it. A luxury yacht, Committee of One, ninety six feet, went down in fifteen thousand feet of water off Mexico. The owner wants her back.”

“Warm waters,” she said. “I like that. Mel will, too. This guy can afford us?”

“According to Adrienne, he’ll foot the bills up to half a million to get his boat back. As long as we’re idle, we might as well cover the overhead.”

“I’ll stock up on Margarita mix.”

“This isn’t a vacation, my dear.”

“Not for you, maybe. Every day I’m on the job, though, it’s vacation for me.”

She smiled up at him, and Brande smiled back.

He loved it, too, and he was trying to think of an excuse to avoid a trip to Washington in search of government funding. He would rather dive in Mexican waters.

Carl Unruh was Deputy Director for Intelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency. Though six of his twenty eight years with the agency had been devoted to the operations directorate, he felt much more comfortable dealing with the cerebral exercises of analysis and prediction that with the action orientation of field work.

On a personal level, he was relatively comfortable with his mid fifties, the sagginess below his green eyes, and the desire for more sleep. He had given up trying to hide the gray at the temples of his dark brown hair. In the past four years, he had smoked nine packs of cigarettes, all during the Russian missile crisis. In the past year, he hadn’t smoked at all, but he carried a still sealed pack of Marlboros in his jacket pocket where he could caress it from time to time, and where it was available if necessary.

Since the missile problem, when he had re established contact with Avery Hampstead at the Commerce Department, with whom he had attended graduate school in international affairs at Princeton, Unruh and Hampstead had developed a lunch and occasional dinner relationship. He wasn’t surprised when his secretary told him on the intercom that Hampstead was on the line.

He picked up the receiver. “Are you buying dinner?”

“Sure,” Hampstead said. “You want to meet me?”

“Where?”

“Let’s try the Brown Palace.”

“Where in the hell is it?”

“Denver.”

“Christ. You’re not even in town. That means you want something, probably top secret.”

Hampstead told him about his meeting with Dr. Shaefer at the Earthquake Information Center.

“We’re talking anomalies, Avery?”

“You do recognize an anomaly when you see one, don’t you, Carl?”

“At least once a day. Where is this going?”

“Shaefer thinks his problem is rooted in man’s evil design. And he may be right. I’m going to see about running a survey in the area, but something occurred to me.”

“What’s that?” Unruh asked.

“I wondered if our esteemed colleagues across the river in the Department of Defense might be conducting some kind of super secret, arcane experimentation. I would hate to send a submersible down there, only to be attacked by friendly Twenty first Century weaponry.”

“And you want me to ask them?”

“That would be my preference,” Hampstead said. “First of all, DOD doesn’t talk to Commerce about its weapons system development. Secondly, they don’t talk to us about their classified weapons systems. Thirdly, refer to the first two points.”

“I’ll ask,” Unruh said, “but I’ll probably regret getting involved.”