Ocean Black

CHAPTER NINE

Avery Hampstead had been at his desk for over an hour when the phone jangled his morning nerves. Angie wasn’t in yet, and normally he wouldn’t answer it. That was how he got his paperwork done.

On the sixth ring, and since it was close to eight o’clock, anyway, he picked up.

“Avery, Dane Brande.”

“Finished already? I told you this was going to be a quick chore. You didn’t even have to go searching since I gave you the locations.”

“I don’t think we’re done with your job, Avery. We’ve looked at three of the sites, up to the one that occurred last Thursday.”

Hampstead felt his stomach sink. There was something was wrong.

“Dokey suggests, and the rest of us agree, that they’re test holes for a mining operation.”

“Test holes?”

“Right. At the third site, our video tapes show what looks like a broken piece of a test probe. That’s a device for pulling core samples out of the ground.”

“I’ve seen a test probe, Dane. You mean to tell me that someone’s working down there regularly?”

“Looks that way.”

“So they’re big blowing holes in the seabed, looking for what?”

“We’re not certain yet. Dokey used Atlas to grab a few pieces of rock before they came up. We’re analyzing those now. More important to us, Avery, is their method of conducting the tests.”

“And that is?”

“Someone’s in a hurry. Our best guess right now is that they’re using nuclear explosives.”

“What!”

“Small ones, but nuclear all the same. The appearance of the excavations suggest they were accomplished with one blast. Also, the third site had some residual radiation hanging around. Our samples are radioactive, also.”

“Goddamn. Can you telex me some pictures? And the test results?”

“I’ll do that. And there’s something you can check for me. Call your buddy at the Earthquake Information Center and find out what time, and at what coordinates, the last disturbance occurred.”

“There was another one?”

“It occurred while DepthFinder was on the bottom. It rocked her around a little, but there was no other damage that we’ve found yet.”

Hampstead found that he was jotting his typically illegible notes on a legal tablet. “Anything else?”

“One more item.” Brande told him about it, and he added to his notes.

“I’ll get back to you, Dane.”

“Soon, Avery. I may need some official guidance on this thing, much as I hate to admit that.”

He hung up and called Unruh at CIA headquarters in Langley, who wasn’t in, but the duty officer promised that he’d find him somewhere.

When the navigational display indicated she had the proper coordinates, Penny Glenn retarded the throttles and shifted to neutral.

The Phantom Lode wallowed in the troughs as she slid out of the helmsman’s seat.

Billy Enders hung up the acoustic telephone. They’re on their way up, Miss Penny.”

“How long?”

“He said maybe two-and-a-half hours.”

“All right. I’m going to take a long, hot shower and pack my bag.”

“Will you be wanting us to hang around here for you?” Enders asked.

Glenn looked around at the horizons. She saw no lights indicating a ship in the vicinity. High to the east were the running lights of some airliner. Still, it wouldn’t be prudent to mark the spot for anyone.

“No, Captain Billy. We want to keep the area clear. Take her to, oh, San Diego, and wait for me there.”

Though he tried not to show it, Enders looked pleased at the news. He would get his boat back for awhile.

And the choice of San Diego gave Glenn a reason for visiting Brande sometime in the near future. She was looking forward to that.

By the time Gary Munro brought the submersible to the surface and they rendezvoused with it, she was showered, had wolfed down some lasagna, and had packed the few things she intended to take with her. She was also impatient, and Glenn was never impatient. In was an unaffordable luxury when dealing with the sea.

The sea was becoming more unruly by the time she transferred to the sub, and she was thoroughly splashed with cold, salty water.

Without waiting to watch the Lode pull away, Glenn slipped through the hatch, dogged it behind her, and settled into one of the passenger seats behind the two controller seats.

In the dim light of the sphere, Munro looked back over his seat at her, infatuated silliness plastered on his face.

“Good to have you back, Penny.”

“Just get us down, will you, Gary?”

He blew ballast, and the sub settled below the surface. AquaGeo’s submersibles were designed with large ballast tanks and the ability to accept three sets of weights. They could make three dives before having their weights replaced, which could be accomplished from either a support ship or by one of the floor crawlers.

“Is something wrong?” Munro asked. “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”

Glenn had been considering her options. She could suspend activities until Brande lost interest, if indeed he had an interest, or she could continue on schedule because it was a free ocean.

“There’s nothing wrong that I know about Gary,” she told him.

Svetlana Polodka and the two graduate students, along with Kaylene Thomas when she popped into the lab now and then, had been conducting the tests on the samples that Dokey had brought up from the bottom.

They were not really equipped to deal with radioactive samples, but they were taking as much care as possible, having placed the four chunks of rock in a glass-fronted enclosure and handling them only with rubber gloves and tongs.

They had chiseled off chunks and soaked them in a variety of solutions, and they had run spectrographic analysis. Weights and measures. She was glad she was a computer person.

Behind them, the door to the stern deck opened and closed irregularly as people came in and went out, servicing the submersible. In the aft portside corner of the lab, the battery chargers hummed incessantly, recharging the packs for DepthFinder and the ROVs.

Polodka was overseeing the kids, who knew more about what they were doing than she did, and entering the data from the tests into a report form now on the monitor of her computer terminal.

On the other side of the lab, at another terminal, Larry Emry was plotting the excavation sites on his maps. The undersea charts were becoming more detailed, now that he had the sonar and video tapes from the first two dives.

The pitch and roll of the Orion, with the cycloidal propellers retracted, was more noticeable as Sorenson moved them toward the next site.

Dokey strolled into the lab, carrying a mug of coffee. The mug was adorned with the legend, “Carry me back to the Old Lusitania.” His sweatshirt was adorned with a colorful picture of a penguin in an orange and green tuxedo and was labeled “Psychedelic Penguin.” In his right hand, he carried a large Danish, and he stopped to hold it over the glass box containing the samples.

“This hot enough to heat my roll, Svet?”

“I don’t think so, Okey.”

“Damn. I was hoping to come up with a substitute for microwave ovens.”

He used his toe to snag the leg of a chair and pull it over next to her, and then sat down. He looked at the rows and columns of figures she had entered into the report.

“That tell you anything?” he asked, taking a big bite out of his Danish.

“Not really.”

“Me, either. Dana, help us out.”

Dana Fullerton, a senior at the University of Southern California, leaned over Polodka’s chair and scanned the information on the screen. She was a pretty girl, and in the good old days, before Dokey had become so involved with Kim Otsuka, she would have been a target of some of his more risqué wit.

“Most of it is what we might expect to find,” she said. “There seems to be a higher than normal concentration of pyrolusite ore.”

“Is that significant?” Dokey asked. He was talking with his mouth full.

“This sample might be. It’s loaded with manganese.”

“Well, big damned deal. What am I going to do with a bunch of hot manganese?”

“Usually, they make steel with it. It’s supposed to harden the steel.”

“Is it rare?”

“No,” Fullerton told him.

“There must be something else there,” he said. “One doesn’t go wasting expensive nuclear explosives on common metallic elements.”

“That’s all we’ve found, so far,” Fullerton said.

“What do you think, Svet?”

Polodka thought about it. “Maybe they didn’t find exactly what they were looking for. Perhaps that is why the site is abandoned.”

“Good point, love. That’s probably the most obvious, and best, answer.”

Wilson Overton was on the ship-to-shore phone, arguing with his editor. Jacobs couldn’t hear all of the words, but he guessed the subject would be money. Most people in the civilized world of business seemed to argue about money more than anything else.

There were so many more important things to debate, Jacobs thought.

Finally, Overton replaced the receiver, though with more force than Jacobs thought necessary. He walked back across the salon, a little unsteady, but that was because he was not a sailor. He had yet to learn how to time his movements with those of the sea.

Sliding into the banquette across from Jacobs, he picked up his coffee cup and drained it.

“Problems at home, Wilson?”

Overton made a face. “Damned editors sit at a desk and think they know what’s going on in the world. They wouldn’t know anything if it weren’t for the people like me, who wear out shoe leather.”

Jacobs couldn’t help thinking that Overton was wearing running shoes.

“I’m sure it will all work out,” Jacobs said.

“Oh, yeah, it always does. Where were we?”

“Let me fill your cup, first.”

Jacobs got up and took both their cups to the small galley for replenishment. He brought them back and settled into his seat.

Overton centered his legal pad in front of him, and turned the tape recorder on.

The reporter was paying for this trip, not only with diesel fuel, but also with words. He was forced to listen to Jacobs’s complaints about the world and those in it. Jacobs had agreed to Overton’s caveat that nothing might appear in print, but he was keeping his discourse logical enough, and without demonstrating the rage he felt.

He was sure that some of what was going into the tape recorder would someday appear on some internal page of the Washington Post.

On a slow news day, perhaps.

Carl Unruh met with the others in a conference room at the State Department on 23rd Street. Since he had talked to Hampstead at nine o’clock, he had been busy trying to get this group together.

It was not the group he would have chosen, if he really wanted to accomplish something, but every time he talked to one person or another, they had suggested someone else. So the representation included the Navy, the State Department, the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, and an assistant to the Vice President — a man who was deeply interested in things ecological.

Commerce had not even sent Hampstead, with whom he could identify. Instead, an assistant to the Secretary named Porter was in attendance.

State’s representative was Damon Gilliland, and Unruh wasn’t sure what the man did in this building. That wasn’t particularly unusual, however; he wasn’t certain what most of the people at State did.

Gilliland was a dapper type, properly encased in blue wool with a regimental tie. He was average height and average brown in eyes and hair. Remarkably unremarkable. He could have been an agent for either the FBI or the Agency.

The woman from the Vice President’s Office, Marlys Anstett, carried herself well, as if she had had graduate courses in posture. She wore a dark cream business suit accented with a gold-and-black silk scarf at her throat. Her face was lean, barely touched with makeup, and memorable in the quizzical set of her eyebrows.

Ben Delecourt was a man that Unruh knew fairly well, the only one in the room that he had met before. The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) had an aggressive jut to his jaw, thin gray hair, and silvery green eyes with all the kindness of torpedoes. Delecourt didn’t often send flunkies on chores that he thought important.

Obviously, this was important to him, and Delecourt was the first to speak after they sat down around the big conference table.

“I don’t know who’s chairing this meeting, if anyone, but Carl, I’m ready to hear more. You were a trifle brief on the phone.”

Unruh had had enough time, while waiting for everyone to decide to get together, to prepare his briefing notes. He referred to them sporadically as he related the concerns of the National Center for Earthquake Information and the involvement of Hampstead and Brande.

“The last information I had, Brande had investigated the first site, some six hundred miles off the coast, and two more sites, another seventy miles to the west.”

He passed around the photographs that Brande had transmitted to Hampstead. “The oceanographers aboard the Orion conclude that the events were man-made and probably in pursuit of mineral deposits.”

“Three miles down?” Marlys Anstett asked.

“That’s right.”

Damon Gilliland asked, “Isn’t that a little bit farfetched? I mean, outside of the conditions imposed on manpower, the expense of mining at that depth would be horrendous.”

“They might be searching for oil,” Unruh said, “and that’s done all the time. In this case, Brande suggests that the profit margins would be much higher, if the developers aren’t paying up-front purchase or lease costs for mineral rights. Not to mention avoiding taxes.”

“We are talking about international waters, correct?” Sam Porter of Commerce asked.

“Correct.”

“Does Brande have any idea who might be behind this operation?” Delecourt asked.

“He thinks,” Unruh said, “that AquaGeo, headed by an Australian named Deride, is the most likely candidate. There are several reasons. One, Deride is known for his off-shore mining and drilling, though this is much deeper than his normal haunts. Two, AquaGeo has the equipment and professional staff to accomplish the task. Three, Brande ran into their chief geologist in the area. And four, Deride is ruthless and greedy enough to utilize nuclear means toward his end.”

“That’s the main concern here, isn’t it?” Delecourt asked. “The nuclear explosives. I think you estimated about a five kiloton yield from each charge.”

“At this point, yes,” Unruh said, passing out more paper. “Brande’s submersible collected samples from the bottom that were definitely radioactive.”

“But three miles down?” Anstett said. “Surely, a five kiloton device isn’t much of a threat.”

“Not to humans, Miss Anstett, no. But if you’ll scan that report, you’ll see that Brande’s people collected data on currents and depths. The residual radiation from a detonation four days ago followed the currents and rose to a depth of around a thousand feet below the surface before it petered out.”

More photographs.

“In an area of approximately three square miles, they found the dead sea life you see in the pictures. A few fish — sharks, tuna, marlin, but this is only four days after the blast. There will be other contaminated fish. And these pictures don’t show the damage to plants or microscopic life, both of which are necessary to ecological balance.”

Marlys Anstett’s face finally developed a frown.

Unruh passed around copies of the chart.

“Dr. Lawrence Emry, the head of exploration for Marine Visions, developed this map. I marked the three sites that Brande has looked at with a yellow marker. The next three have been pinpointed by the Earthquake Information Center. Dr. Emry concurs with the Center in that the pattern appears to be following an arc toward the northwest, which will lead directly into the Pioneer Fracture Zone.”

“With all of the potential that has for shaking up Californians,” Delecourt added.

“What do you think, Admiral?” Unruh asked.

Delecourt’s thin lips compressed even more as he considered the question. Finally, he said, “It’s possible, of course. A small atomic device, if detonated in exactly the right place, might trigger a chain reaction. Pretty remote, though, I believe. What seems more likely is the prospect of several, or of larger, devices being used simultaneously should a profitable and deep deposit of minerals be located. Then, the odds go against us. I don’t know what the seabed structures look like, but the scenario could be exactly what we fear.”

Gilliland of State said, “What we want to do then, is stop Deride.”

“If it’s Deride,” Unruh cautioned.

“We can’t,” Gilliland said. “He’s operating in international waters.”

“I don’t think,” Sam Porter of Commerce said, “that our objective is to stop his mining. Just his use of nuclear explosives.”

“That would drive his costs up substantially,” Delecourt said. “I suspect that he will object.”

Pamela Stroh of the Justice Department, who had been silent until then, and whose white tresses reminded Unruh of a large shaggy puppy, said, “Object or not, the man has to have some consideration for people, and for the planet.”

Unruh was always less-than-impressed with optimistic people who didn’t see the world in the same realities that were forced upon him.

“For lack of a chair,” Delecourt said, “let me make some suggestions. We need to know more about AquaGeo and Deride, and whether or not they’re involved. Carl, could CIA undertake that?”

Unruh nodded.

“And Mr. Porter, how about Commerce looking into Deride’s business dealings, here and internationally?”

“Certainly, Admiral.”

“State might make inquiries into his activities in Australia and determine what his relationship to the government there is. And some preparation might be initiated in the way of forming a complaint to the United Nations.”

Gilliland said, “I’ll do that.”

“Miss Anstett, I would recommend that both the Vice President and the President be briefed on this. The President may want to set up a task force.”

“All right, Admiral.”

“I’ll inform the Joint Chiefs and set up a liaison with Brande.”

That would make Brande ecstatic, Unruh thought. Brande didn’t care for some Navy protocols, such as the chain of command.

“What about Justice, Admiral?” Pamela Stroh asked.

“If it were me, I’d get about ten lawyers busy on a brief for the World Court.”

Which was just about the way Unruh thought this thing would unravel.

Bureaucrats and lawyers.

Brande had opted, without consulting Washington, to skip sites four, five, and six, and go right for the location of the seventh detonation, a position Hampstead had verified through the Earthquake Information Center.

He, Dokey, and Mayberry were manning the submersible, over the objections of the female members of the team. They were also wearing radiation protective gear, environmental suits that had become standard equipment on the Orion after the Russian missile fiasco.

He and Dokey had switched jobs four hours after deployment, to relieve the tedium. Dokey was controlling the sonar vehicle, and Brande was piloting DepthFinder. He kept his hands lightly on the joysticks, properly called the translation hand controller and the rotational hand controller. Directly ahead of the joysticks, beneath the port cathode ray tube (CRT), were the primary piloting instruments, duplicates of the set in front of Dokey.

The compasses, both magnetic and gyro, defined the horizontal direction. The depth readouts kept him oriented vertically, providing distance to surface, altitude above bottom, and the rate of change. The speed was defined in knots, and tachometers monitored the speed of both electric motors.

The view through the portholes might as well have been into the black hole of space. On the center CRT was Sarscan’s video view, into the same black hole even though the floodlights were activated. The port and starboard screens displayed the submersible’s sonar and the ROV’s sonar respectively.

Brande shifted around in his protective suit, which was bulky. He was both cold and uncomfortable, even though none of them were wearing the hoods to the suits. They had yet to run into high areas of radiation.

He felt the sub slither to the left, and he corrected with the rotational stick.

“Current shift,” he said.

“And radiation,” Mayberry added. “It jumped about six percent.”

“Getting close, then,” Dokey said.

Two minutes later, Dokey added, “Son of a bitch! I’ve got a moving target.”

Brande glanced across at the ROV sonar screen. A heavy mass was moving across the seabed. It appeared to be part of the sea floor.

“What’s the distance, Okey?”

“Twelve hundred yards.”

“Bearing?”

“Hold on… two-six-four degrees. It’s making about six knots.”

“Take her down,” Mayberry commanded. “We’re right on the coordinates.”

“Don’t lose that target,” Brande said.

“Not in a million years, Chief.”

Brande eased the control stick forward and the submersible nosed downward.

Altitude above bottom, 450 feet. Depth, 16,286 feet.

Minutes later, Sarscan’s video lens picked up the excavation site. It appeared to be the same as the previous three. Organic rubble was strewn about the floor of the sea to the limits of the video camera. If they took time to investigate, he thought it would be like the previous sites: rubble for nearly half-a-mile. Tiny glints of some mineral reflected the floodlights back at the camera.

“Hoods, gentlemen,” Mayberry said. “We’re getting a healthy dose.”

Brande found his hood at the side of his seat and pulled it over his head. He hated it. The loose folds felt cold on his neck and the visor restricted his vision.

“There’s nothing new here,” Dokey said. “Let’s chase the floor crawler.”

Brande eased into a left turn.

“What are you doing?” Thomas asked from the surface.

“Exploring an anomaly,” Brande said. “I’d like radio and acoustic silence, please.”

“Why?” she asked.

“No telling who’s listening.”

Mayberry switched the communications systems to passive, though Brande suspected that, if there were another acoustic system in the area, it would probably be operating on a different frequency. They had not yet heard anything interfering with their own communications.

“Bob, try scanning some of the frequencies.”

“We don’t have an automatic scanner,” Mayberry said.

“Try it manually.”

“God, what a cheap outfit.”

“An acoustic scanner,” Dokey said, “is something you won’t find in your catalogs of electronic toys.”

“We’ll have to build one.”

“In our spare time?” Dokey asked.

“Distance to target?”

“Six-two-four yards, four hundred feet down. Hold this level, Chief; the floor is rising on us. I’m bringing Sarscan up a trifle.”

With only occasional glances at his instruments, Brande kept his attention on the video screen. The other two were doing the same.

“Come right a tad,” Dokey said.

“What’s a tad?”

“Scientific talk for one degree.”

He changed heading by one degree.

The view from the ROV’s video was of a mildly undulating seabed. Fissures marked the surface, and a few giant boulders appeared now and then.

There was also a dual set of tracks, like a farm road across the desert.

“Tracked vehicle,” Dokey said.

“Steel treads, I’d guess,” Brande told him. Each set has about a four-foot span.”

“Big mother, then.”

And it was big, when they slowly drifted up behind it. The massive tracks were raising a cloud of silt behind it, and a bank of floodlights lit the seafloor ahead of it. Above the moving tracks was a huge spherical pressure hull with a variety of appendages — manipulator arms, remote-controlled cameras, drills, and other unexplained objects. There were no marking on it.

“Do we stop and say ‘howdy’?” Dokey asked.

“I don’t think so,” Brande said. “That hummer’s going somewhere, and that’s where we want to go.”

“Do you suppose they go straight home when mother calls them?”

“Let’s hope so. We’ll stay on this course.”

“Come up a few hundred, then. Let’s give these guys some clearance.”

“They probably know we’re here,” Mayberry said. “They wouldn’t dare operate down here without sonar gear.”

“Which means mother already knows about us,” Brande told him.

Brande increased his altitude and his speed, and they cruised on in silence except for the drone of the electric motors. The floor crawler disappeared from the ROV’s camera, sliding off the bottom of the screen.

“Damned place is getting overcrowded,” Dokey said. “I don’t like working around people I don’t know.”

“Move to the suburbs.”

“I thought I was in the suburbs.”

What he was looking for was further away than he thought it would be. At their top speed of twenty knots, it took them over five hours. One hundred and twenty-four miles over the seafloor. Brande broke his communications silence three times to reassure those on the surface about their condition and to direct Mel Sorenson to bring the Orion along with them.

They had slowly gained altitude, and were at 13,000 feet below the surface when Dokey yawned and said, “Metallic mass, dead ahead, fourteen hundred yards.”

Brande said, “Battery charges, Bob?”

“We’re okay. Got about forty percent left.”

“Let’s go easy on the systems draw, then.”

Brande pulled off some power, and they drifted in on the target.

Sarscan picked up on it a few minutes later.

“Big devil, isn’t she?” Dokey asked.

It was a typical arrangement for a seabed habitat at this depth, pressure hull mounted on sealegs. It was difficult to judge the size from the video image, but Brande agreed with Dokey. It was larger than he had thought it might be.

“Sub in attendance,” Dokey said.

“And another crawler,” Mayberry added.

Attached to the bottom of the pressure hull was the top mating hatch of a submersible, and attached to an elongated tube extending from the base of the pressure hull was another of the floor crawlers.

“Home sweet home,” Brande said. “Let’s get lots of pictures — video and still.”

“Underway, Chief.”

“You pick up anything on the acoustic, Bob?”

“Some babble on one frequency, but nothing else.”

“Let me have the controls, Chief,” Dokey said, “and I’ll move right in and knock on their door.”

“I think we’ll telephone before our first visit, Okey. Let’s just get our pictures and go home.”

They circled the sea station slowly, snapping photographs from different angles. Brande was certain the station had sonar tracking them, but they saw no signals of greeting, nor any movement.

The station seemed innocuous enough.

And simultaneously sinister.