Ocean Black

CHAPTER FIVE

Sarscan II was almost identical to her predecessor, SARSCAN, and had been given the name instead of the acronym for Search and Rescue Scanner.

The sonar search vehicle was twelve feet long and almost four feet wide — a fiberglass box with rounded corners, but she did not have robotic arms. Sarscan II was an improvement over her predecessor in that she mounted floodlights and cameras, combining the sonar and visual search functions. Because of her size, she was not a total replacement for the much smaller Sneaky Pete, who could maneuver his cameras into some very tight places, but on search or research missions with a scale grander than the pilothouse or cargo hold of a sunken ship, she precluded the requirement to operate two separate ROV’s — remotely operated vehicles.

She was still a towed vehicle utilizing rudders and planes for stability and limited guidance, but unable to move on her own. Brande anticipated that the next generation of Sarscan would also have a self contained propulsion system. If developments that were showing promise in the Loudspeaker acoustical system proved out, she might also operate without the hindrance of a tether.

Dressed in the corporate colors and resting on a trailer parked next to the Commercial Basin warehouse, Sarscan II appeared simplistic. Her innards, as Dokey called them, were considerably more complex, however. An open gridwork supported the exterior streamlining panels as well as the interior sonar antennas and miniature pressure hulls containing computers, batteries, and transducers. One reinforced ball housed the solenoids that controlled the stubby rudder and the diving planes on the aft end. The heavy duty connector that coupled her, via a Tevlar shielded fiber optic cable, to the tow vehicle was mounted on the top surface of the forward end. On either side of the coupling connection were fairings that housed the floodlights and two cameras. One was a seventy-millimeter still camera, and the other was a video camera that had a limited forty-degree range of travel from side to side, as well as up and down.

Designed for intensive bottom searching, the sonar did not have a lot of range, but it was very powerful and very accurate downward for a thousand feet and sideways for three thousand feet. The images it picked up were transmitted through the optic fiber towing cable and displayed on screens aboard the towing vehicle. Sarscan’s functions were a great deal more complex than her appearance sitting on a trailer on a San Diego dock in the early morning.

The sun was well above the horizon and a light fog was burning off as Brande waited on the dock for the arrival of Orion. It promised to be a blue-sky day, typically balmy, and a great substantiation of his rationale for headquartering MVU in San Diego.

Waiting with him was Kenji Nagasaka, one of Orion’s helmsmen, who had helped him move Sarscan to the dock from the workshop. Nagasaka had obtained his degree from the University of Southern California the previous spring, but his year of internship on board the research vessel was one factor that had convinced him that he wanted to stay near the water. Brande knew the obsession.

Nagasaka was short and slim, with lanky black hair under little control. He was also madly in love with Kim Otsuka, who was eight years his senior and, Brande thought, bound to frustrate him. She had other interests.

Nagasaka sat on one of the trailer’s fenders. He said, “This was a sudden decision, wasn’t it, Dr. Brande?”

At sea, Nagasaka was given to calling him “Chief,” as most everyone did, but his innate politeness prevailed ashore.

“Someone is in a hurry, Kenji. It kind of filters down to us.”

“What are we looking for?”

“That’s the fun part,” Brande said. “We don’t know.”

“Well, I’m happy to be doing something. Waiting around for Orion to be overhauled is nerve-wracking.”

Brande remembered his youth on the Minnesota wheat farm as filled with the same inaction. The highlight of every year occurred during harvest when the unruly custom combine crews came through. Their long, hard days and their brawling nights had made his life seem lazy by comparison. Those indolent years occasionally seemed desirable now, but they had driven him to skiing, scuba diving, automobile racing, and sky diving. Action in any form.

A dark blue Buick Park Avenue turned in from the street and parked in the cramped parking lot at the side of the building. Lawrence Emry got out, locked the door, and headed toward them carrying a small duffle bag.

Emry was tiny at five-five. He sported a full, gray moustache in compensation for his baldness. At sixty-four, he was the oldest employee of MVU, but his experience went far beyond his doctorate in geophysics toward making him a wise man. He was the Director of Exploration.

“Where’s the damned boat?” he asked.

“Good morning to you, too,” Brande said.

“Kaylene caught me last night, two hours before I was to take off for Tahiti. My morning was supposed to be quite different from this.” Emry waved a hand at the freighters docked around the basin.

“Well, hell, Larry. I forgot about your vacation,” Brande grinned at him. “Tell you what. You reschedule your flight, and I’ll handle the mapping.”

“And no doubt get yourself lost, Dane. No, I’d better go along this time.”

Emry wouldn’t pass up an intriguing expedition for anything in the world, Tahiti included.

“Here she comes,” Nagasaka said, scrambling up from his seat on the trailer fender.

Brande looked east to see Orion turning into the basin. As Connie Alvarez-Sorenson had said, she appeared much more natural in the water.

The topsides paint still looked a little dingy, but a fresh coat could wait. They had things to do and places to go, and Brande was almost as excited about the prospects as he had been the day he left the farm.

When the research vessel drew near, the tone of her diesel engines ebbing, he could see Mel Sorenson’s face behind the safety glass windscreen of the bridge. Fred Boberg, the other helmsman was on the wheel, and Frank Vogl, the chief and only engineer, was standing next to Sorenson.

Bucky Sanders and Paco Suarez, the two communications specialists were leaning against the railing on the main deck, alongside the superstructure. They shared the chores in the radio shack, but anymore, the ability to turn a knob was not an adequate job description. Both men were engineering students, completely familiar with all of the electronic wizardry that filled the communications and chart compartments. Nothing made them happier than when Brande had made a finger-walking tour through a marine electronics catalog.

Sorenson issued the orders, and Orion slowed, turned, and began to back into the pier. Normally, she was dock abeam of the pier, but loading Depthfinder required that she be stern-on to the pier.

Seamen and women appeared on the deck to handle lines, and Nagasaka ran forward to help.

Twenty minutes later, the ship was snugged up against her fenders, and Emry had carried his charts and CD-ROM discs aboard to begin setting up his computers.

This expedition was one of search, rather than recovery, and Brande had selected his deep submergence vehicles with that objective in mind. Sarscan was wheeled forward onto the dock, and a marine biologist switched hats and became a crane operator, maneuvering the starboard aft crane into position to lift the sonar search vehicle aboard. She would be tied down on the starboard, stern hull.

Dokey arrived by the time they had opened the big sliding doors to the warehouse. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt with the one-foot high red letters, “YES!” emblazoned on the back. Dokey and the women of MVU were fighting a sexual innuendo battle through decorative shirts. The female version was “NO!”

He was also working his way through breakfast burritos and a tall cup of coffee.

“Hell, Chief,” he said. “I thought you’d be loaded by now. I was ready to go aboard and climb into my bunk.”

Brande looked him over carefully. “I think you’re getting old, Okey. Little more gray at the temples. Timing’s way off. I’m going to be worried about your reflexes.”

Dokey snorted. “My reflexes are excellent. Where they count.”

They grinned at each other and turned to enter the warehouse.

With the doors open, Depthfinder was visible. Her sister, Depthfinder II, was aboard the Gemini, now working the Caribbean out of Galveston. Brande was always happy when both research vessels were on contract simultaneously, making some effort to cover their costs of operation.

The early light sifted through the doorway and reflected off the submersible’s waxed paint. The outer hull was composed of carbon fiber reinforced plastic and fiberglass. On the surface of the sea, she appeared sleek, the outer hull disguising the round ball of the pressure hull. She was thirty eight feet long, with a beam of eleven feet, and she weighed in at forty three tons. The main hull was twelve feet high, and she towered above them.

Adding to the perceived immensity, the sail was four feet high. It was fiberglass and utile solely in preventing waves from splashing through the hatchway when she was moving on the surface. In the water, the top of the hull stood barely a foot above the surface of the sea. The transponder interrogator, a UHF antenna, and the depth sonar were mounted on the aft end of the sail. Within the enclosed sail was room for two people to stand, if they liked each other relatively well.

The outer hull was a streamlined enclosure containing the spherical pressure hull that protected humans from the crushing pressures in the ocean depths. The secondary hull was not subjected to the same pressures, and it also contained the spherical tanks used for variable ballast, high pressure air, hydraulic power supplies, and fore and aft mercury trim. Forward of the pressure hull were thirty five and seventy millimeter still cameras, video cameras, halogen lights, ballast tanks, and the forward looking sonar. To the rear of the pressure hull were altitude and side looking sonars, the magnetometer gear, weight droppers, the massive propulsion motors, controller and junction boxes, and the three banks of batteries. Syntactic foam had been sprayed into all empty spaces.

Barely protruding from the lower hull were small flanged steel wheels. They kept the submersible aligned on a portable section of railroad track. It matched the tracks on the deck of the Orion.

While half-a-dozen people began moving additional sections of track into place across the dock, Brande found a ladder, leaned it against the hull, and climbed up to, and over, the sail. He opened a watertight compartment in the decking and switched off the shoreside power. When Depthfinder was aboard her mother ship or stranded on land, her computers and electronics were fed from outside power sources in order to preserve her batteries.

With minimal use of the electric propulsion motors and energy consuming electrical systems, the three sets of batteries could provide 150 hours of life support. Eighty hours of time was available at normal consumption rates, and thirty five hours was the safety limit at maximum current draw. Additionally, there was a backup system within the pressure hull, good for another five hours with minimal usage of the submersible’s systems. Brande’s safety consciousness, however, had dictated an MVU policy that battery packs be exchanged one set recycling and recharging on board the research vessel any time a submersible surfaced after more than three hours down.

He looked over the side.

Dokey looked up at him. “Clear?”

“Clear.”

Dokey unplugged the umbilical to the warehouse power.

When the portable track sections were in place, everyone gathered around the submersible. Dokey pulled the chocks from the wheels, and two dozen willing hands began to push the submersible from the warehouse and out onto the dock toward the stern of the research vessel.

They eased her to a stop with her bow projecting out over the water, almost centered between the aft hulls of the ship.

The massive steel yoke above Brande started moving backward, toward him, stopping when it was almost directly above. Its two legs rotated in mounts attached to each of the catamaran hulls. Cables stretched to winches on the main deck controlled the forward and aft movement of the yoke. The main lift cable was suspended from the center of the yoke. The lift operator, a seaman named Del Rogers, signaled Brande, and he turned a thumb downward. The weighted cable, its length snaking through multiple block-and-tackle units, descended toward him.

Brande raised his hands to guide it aft, then leaned way over the sail and snapped it into the lifting eye. Raising his arm, he signaled reverse by circling his hand, and Rogers started it in the opposite direction.

Slowly, Depthfinder lifted off the tracks, and then began to turn sideways. Dokey grabbed a bow line and tossed it to a woman aboard the ship, and she used it to keep the bow aligned. At full lift, Rogers broke the ascent, and then started the yoke moving forward.

The submersible left the safety of the dock and approached the ship. Brande could have sworn he felt her hull vibrating in eagerness as she returned to her proper environment.

Above the deck, Rogers lowered her, and deckhands guided her onto her tracks. The big doors into the main laboratory were open, and a cable from an interior winch was snapped into the sub’s bow eye. She could be hauled inside for maintenance if it were necessary.

While she was being snugged down to the deck, Dokey leaped to the deck of the ship and rolled a scaffold into place against the sub’s hull, and Brande crawled over the sail and descended from his high perch.

Mel Sorenson and Connie Alvarez-Sorenson were waiting on the deck with Dokey.

“For the record, Chief,” Sorenson said, “I’m not happy about interrupting our maintenance schedule.”

“And off the record, Mel?”

“How much longer before we get underway?” Sorenson grinned.

“Just as soon as we’re stocked and all systems have been checked out.”

“What’s our crew complement?” Alvarez-Sorenson asked.

It was a good question. The crew makeup changed with every voyage. Scientists and engineers doubled as deckhands and galley personnel, reporting to the expedition commander in one capacity and to the ship’s commanders in another.

“You just want to know who you can order around, darlin’,” Sorenson said to his wife.

“We know of at least one she can boss, don’t we?” Dokey said, grinning at the ship’s captain.

Brande dug a Post-it note out of his breast pocket and handed it to her.

“We’ll be a little light, Connie. It’s a pretty straight-forward operation. Larry will handle the mapping. Okey and I will man the ROVs. In addition to the basic ship’s company, I’ve named nine others. Mostly, they’re people who haven’t been out for awhile. There’s a couple grad students who haven’t yet made a voyage. You and Mel can assign them any way you want.”

She scanned the listing. “Kaylene’s not going?”

“Not this trip.”

“Does she know?”

“Well, uh….”

Connie Alvarez-Sorenson looked up at him. “Can I be here when the fireworks start?”

Kaylene Thomas turned her car into the parking lot next to the warehouse. In her rear view mirror, she saw the van-bodied truck behind her signaling for the same turn.

She took the last parking place available, shut off the engine, and got out.

The truck eased to a stop next to her, and she told the driver, “You can park on the dock next to the ship. Everything goes aboard.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The truck rolled forward.

As she walked around the corner of the warehouse, she noted the activity aboard the Orion. People moved around with purpose, carrying cardboard boxes, recoiling lines, checking fire extinguishers. There were some employees on the ship that she hadn’t expected to be there, the two new interns — Bryce and Walters, for example. Connie and Mel cruised among them, supervising those with less experience aboard a research ship.

Depthfinder II and Sarscan were already in place on deck. Atlas, the small recovery robot, was in a sheath located under the submersible’s bow. She supposed that a couple Sneaky Petes were lashed down in the lab. That would be all they needed for this expedition.

She checked inside the warehouse, but couldn’t find Brande. Crossing the dock, she used the jury-rigged gangplank to board the ship.

He wasn’t in the big lab, either. The five computer consoles lining the aft starboard side of the lab had all been activated, and Dokey and Otsuka were going over them, double-checking their software.

“Hi, Kaylene,” Otsuka said.

“Have you seen Dane, Kim?”

“In the wardroom with Larry, I think.”

“You bring us nourishment?” Dokey asked.

“You’ll survive,” she said, turning to continue on through the lab.

At the forward end, she passed through the hatchway which led into a corridor that crossed the superstructure from one side to the other. Various companionways led to crew accommodations and engineering spaces in the twin hulls or to the deck above. Across the corridor was the open door to the wardroom which spanned the full width of the superstructure. It contained a galley in one corner, a scattering of tables and chairs, and booths along the starboard bulkhead. Oversized portholes gave diners and those off-duty a view of the seas ahead and to either side. It was a combination lounge, recreation area, and in Emry’s case, office. He preferred to set up a computer terminal in one of the booths to putting up with the often hectic activity in the lab.

She found the two of them parked in the first booth. A monitor and keyboard dominated the table between them, and Emry was pecking away with the forefingers of both hands. He had never learned touch-typing, but didn’t suffer much for speed anyway.

“Morning, Rae,” Brande said. “You’re looking vibrant today.”

He had gotten up and left the condo sometime in the middle of the night. He did that frequently, when some project was on his mind. Irregular hours were normal for him.

Emry glanced up from the monitor. “Ditto.”

“Any trouble provisioning us?” Brande asked.

“No. We’ve got a couple weeks’ worth going aboard now.”

“Hmm. I thought we’d settled on a week.”

“And I decided that you and Avery may have underestimated the time this is going to take.”

“That’s nonsense, Kaylene,” Emry said. “You have to remember that they’ve got me. Plus we have the exact coordinates from the Earthquake Center.”

“MVU policy,” she said, “is always to err on the side of safety. Or of hunger.”

“Good point,” Emry said.

Brande was watching her eyes closely. He was getting better and better at reading her moods. Almost as good as she was at reading his.

“Is something bothering you, Rae.”

“I’m assuming that John Bryce and Alicia Walters are simply helping load the ship.”

“Uh, well….”

“As well as Cornwell, Prettyman, and Forester?”

“Well, you see….”

“We only settled on the number of crew last night, Dane. We hadn’t talked about names.”

“I kinda did that this morning,” he said.

“Let me see the list.”

“Connie’s got it.”

“Tell me, then.”

He rattled off the names of those he had assigned, without consulting her, above the ship’s cadre.

“The kids aren’t ready yet,” she said. “They haven’t even finished their orientation sessions.”

“Oh, I think they need the trip, hon. They….”

“You conveniently left me off the manifest.”

“Well, now, I know you’ve got a lot of work stacked up.”

“It can wait. I haven’t been out for over six months, and I didn’t take on this job because I wanted to be stuck in the office permanently. You sure as hell aren’t pinning yourself down, are you?”

“Somebody’s got to watch over the shop,” he said.

“Maybe I should run an errand,” Emry said, starting to slide out of the booth.

“Sit, Larry,” she said.

He sat.

“You’ve already told everyone that they’re going?” she asked Brande.

“Yeah, I did.”

“I won’t countermand that, then, but damn it, if you want me to be president, let me be president.”

“Sorry, Rae.”

“And I’m going along.”

“But….”

“Ingrid can sit in my chair for a few days, if she can find my chair. Either that, or I resign as president.”

“Oh, now, Kaylene!” Emry said. “Don’t do that. I like getting my paycheck on time.”

“Or better,” she said, “you stay behind and do the paperwork. I can handle Depthfinder as well as you.”

“I think,” Brande said, “that Ingrid would be a fine acting president.”

It wasn’t until after Otsuka and Dokey had shared ham sandwiches and milk in the wardroom that Otsuka learned she wasn’t on the crew manifest for this mission.

Emry and Brande were sitting in the booth next to them, and Otsuka leaned around her back cushion and asked, “Dane, what time do you think we’ll get off?”

Brande looked at his watch. “Depends on the systems checks, Kim. Mel’s changing out a Loran, right now. Probably around eight tonight.”

“Based on past performance,” Emry broke in, “add a couple hours to that.”

“Okey and I will go help. The sooner I’m at sea the better.”

“Uh, Kim,” Brande said. “I hadn’t planned on, uh, having you along this trip.”

“What!”

“It’s just a quickie. A few days.”

“Sarscan has hardware and software that hasn’t been field tested. I had damned well better be there when something goes wrong.” She felt strongly about that. They were her systems, after all. Well, Svetlana had helped with the software.

“Uh oh,” Emry said.

Dokey didn’t say anything, which wasn’t like him.

“Well, I don’t know. Rae has the crew list….”

“Then I’ll talk to her.”

Otsuka scrambled out of her seat and tromped across the carpeted deck toward the door. She was so small that tromping did not work well for her.

Wilson Overton of the Washington Post knocked twice on the frame of the door to his editor’s office.

Ned Nelson looked up from some story he was scanning on his monitor. “Come on in, Wilson. Something up?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Wilson took one of the plastic chairs, turned it around, and sat with his arms resting on the back. “I was over at the Navy’s Research and Development Center, just poking around.”

“With the Navy, isn’t ‘trolling’ a more apt description than ‘poking?’“

Overton smiled. Since his stories on the Russian missile crisis in the Pacific, when he’d come within an inch of a Pulitzer — he was certain, Nelson had pretty much given him free rein to snoop around the naval and intelligence circles of the capitol.

“Some of these guys you’ve got to poke a little. Anyway, I had an ice cream cone with a bunch of junior officers who are working on some project they wouldn’t tell me about. Has to do with sonar.”

Nelson leaned back in his thickly-cushioned desk chair. “Sonar sounds to me like a very, very dry subject.”

“Bad, Ned. Bad, bad, bad. Anyway, there’s a lieutenant j.g. visiting from the Pentagon, and maybe he’s not paying much attention to me. I don’t think he knew who I was. He wasn’t giving away much, but he wanted to know about progress on this sonar system. He wanted to recommend to his bosses that it be tested in the Pacific off San Francisco.”

“And they said?”

“They said, ‘next year, if they were real lucky.”

“Is this going somewhere, Wilson? And if it’s going toward some magnificent piece on sonar, I’ll pass.”

“Not the sonar, Ned. The Pacific.”

“The Pacific. As in ocean.”

“Right. The Navy’s got something down there that they can’t identify.”

Nelson’s eyes narrowed as he considered the implications.

“Probably just a Russian sub.”

“They can identify Russian subs. You’ve read Clancy.”

“This means your gut instincts are telling you to go to the West Coast.”

“Well, yeah,” Overton admitted.

“On my expense account.”

“That would be best, Ned.”

“Oh, hell! If you can’t pin something down in five days, Wilson, I want your butt on plane back to town.”

It was a rare Friday for Hampstead. He had gotten away from the office at three o’clock.

He surprised Alicia by showing up early, then taking her out to a tremendous prime rib dinner. They had gotten home just in time to catch the beginning segment of another rerun of Lonesome Dove.

Hampstead had seen it three time before, but he couldn’t yet predict when he might get tired of Gus McCrae and his fellow travelers. Alicia thought that he just liked all of that dust and dirt as a relief from saltwater.

He shed his business suit and donned a jogging suit Adrienne had given him for Christmas two years before. He didn’t jog, but he did wear the baggy suit. Which was not what Adrienne had had in mind, he was sure.

He got a bag of pretzels and a bottle of Michelob and the remote controls for the TV and the VCR — he was going to record it this time, for sure — and settled into his Lazy Boy.

And the phone rang.

Alicia answered the remote telephone, then came in from the kitchen and handed it to him.

“Dane Brande,” she said.

He finished chewing a pretzel and took the phone.

“This better not take long. I’m watching Lonesome Dove.”

“You miss it the first time, Avery?” Brande asked.

“Not the first, nor the second.”

“Perhaps you were born in the wrong century?”

“No doubt about it. I know I was. Tell me about it.”

“About what?”

“You’ve run into a little snag, right?”

Brande laughed. “Of course not. We’re just getting underway. I’m calling from the Orion.”

“But…?”

“But we need to alter our contract a little.”

“I haven’t even written it yet.”

“That’s why I thought I’d call now. Before you finished it.”

“You want more money.”

“When we first talked, I thought nine professional staff was going to be sufficient.”

“And now it’s up to…?”

“Thirteen.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Turns out that, since Sarscan’s undergoing her first sea trials, we need to have Svetlana, Kim, and Bob Mayberry along. Rae’s going to help out, too.”

“Sounds like a joy ride to me,” Hampstead said.

Brande laughed, confirming Hampstead’s assessment. “It’ll be a short ride, Avery. We’ll be on site in fifteen or sixteen hours.”

“While I’m paying umpteen thousand dollars an hour.”

“But you’re getting the very best, Avery.”

“We can debate that later, Dane. Right now, the pigs are on screen.”

After he hung up, it took him a little while to get into the movie. He couldn’t decide whether he would rather be living along the Rio Grande or sailing into a starlit Pacific.