The Emerald Scepter

CHAPTER TWO

Fifty feet below the surface, the alien intruder skimmed over the sea bottom, emitting a sinister hum and scattering silvery explosions of codfish as it burbled through the water. The box-shaped object was the color of a Yellow Cab and about the size of an old steamer trunk that had been flattened in transit, and its edges had been slightly rounded. Four stubby supports, like the legs on an overweight dachshund, extended to sled runners from the plastic housing.

Printed in black on the plastic battery housing were the words:

The vehicle stopped in front of a sliding gate that barred the way into a maze made from a framework of pipes covered in chicken wire and joined together like an old Tinker Toy. The vehicle’s camera fed the image of the gate to its computers, which sent an order to the mechanical arm at the front of the vehicle. The arm slowly unfolded, and an aluminum claw gripped the edge of the gate and pulled the barrier aside.

The vehicle swam through the opening and navigated the maze like a mouse in a lab test. Encountering a dead end, it backed out and tried another route. With each mistake, new information was added to the submersible’s data base until the vehicle popped out of the maze and headed toward a plastic storage box.

Hovering above the ocean bottom around twenty feet from the maze, Matt Hawkins watched the submersible’s antics through a video camera view-finder. He filmed the submersible as the mechanical claw removed the lid and pulled a plastic bag from the box. The vehicle pivoted slowly, stopped for a few seconds, then moved toward Hawkins and placed the bag on the sea floor. Hawkins patted the plastic housing and picked up the bag. The submersible then rose to the surface, plowed through the water a short distance, and slid into a horse-shoe shaped docking station floating on pontoons next to a white-hulled fishing boat.

Hawkins breast-stroked to the boat’s stern ladder. He handed up the bag, unclipped his weight belt and passed it and the camera to a man wearing a tan duck-billed baseball cap. He shed his SCUBA gear, climbed the ladder onto the deck, and peeled his neoprene hood off to reveal a thick mane of salt-and pepper hair and a gray-streaked beard. He stripped down to his bathing trunks and let the summer sun bake away the drops of moisture beading a muscular body that looked as if it had been carved from oak wood.

Hawkins had inherited his warm complexion, rugged profile, and lava-black eye color from his mother’s Micmac Indian forebears. His big-boned physique, with its broad shoulders and six-foot-two inch height, were gifts passed down from his English-Irish ancestors.

After stowing his dive gear in a locker, he turned to the man in the tan cap, Howard Snow — Snowy to friends — and raised his hand in a high-five. Snowy’s crinkled face had been weathered by years of exposure to sun and wind as a commercial fisherman. He removed the cold stub of the cigar clenched in his teeth.

“Congratulations, Matt,” he said, returning the high-five. “Watched the whole thing over the TV hookup. Fido behaved like a champ. Hell, he would have wagged his tail if he had one.”

“I’ll hook up a mechanical tail in time for the demo,” Hawkins said. His dark eyes twinkled with good humor. “The navy brass will get a kick out of seeing a mine detection vehicle acting like a puppy-dog. Maybe I can make him pee on an admiral’s leg.”

Snowy chortled. He knew Hawkins was capable of doing exactly what he’d suggested.

Hawkins untied the bag and pulled out a foam cooler wrapped with plastic twine, which he cut with his dive knife. Inside the box was a bottle of double-malt whiskey.

Snowy shook his head. “Heard on the docks that Fido is worth close to half a million bucks.”

The right tip of Hawkins’ mouth tweaked up in a half smirk. “Let’s just say that the navy owes me more than a bucket of clams for developing the little guy.”

“Hope the navy doesn’t mind spending that kind of dough for an underwater booze fetcher.”

“Fido is a retriever. No one will complain after they see these tests, Snowy. The artificial intelligence that allowed Fido to navigate the maze is going to make the navy and the scientists very happy. Fido can do all sorts of things, from defusing a mine to retrieving a salinity detector. And he works cheap.”

Hawkins’ answer summed up the symbiotic ties between the navy and the world-renowned Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Using funds from the navy and the resources of the institution had allowed Hawkins to design an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle that would serve both masters.

As one of Woods Hole’s leading robotic engineers, Hawkins embodied the arrangement. His SeaBot Corporation was given wide latitude that allowed him to hire Howard Snow and buy the forty-two-foot trawler Osprey for sea tests. Snowy, a wiry third-generation fisherman, had an encyclopedic knowledge of the sea, and his handyman’s skills were considerable. He had constructed the maze in his workshop. The Osprey had transported the sections to the test site over several days and they were lowered to the bottom. Hawkins dove and joined the sections together.

They winched Fido and the docking platform on board and anchored a radar buoy to warn net fishermen away from the site. Minutes later, they were cruising at twenty knots north toward Cape Cod. When they were close enough to Woods Hole to see the brick buildings that housed the institution’s labs and offices, Hawkins ducked into the cuddy cabin and changed into faded jeans, a chambray work shirt and work boots. He had radioed ahead, and the Water Street drawbridge was being raised to let the boat into Eel Pond.

They tied up at the dock and used a boom to lift the submersible and docking station onto the back of a vintage fire engine red pick-up truck. Then they pulled away from the dock, hooked the anchor line onto a mooring buoy in the pond, and used a pram to get back to shore. Snowy asked Hawkins if he wanted to celebrate the tests with a beer at the venerable Captain Kidd bar that overlooked the pond.

“Maybe later,” Hawkins said. “I want to work on my report while the stuff is still rattling around in my skull.”

“Don’t be too long. People will think that you’re unsociable.”

Hawkins was aware that his colleagues admired his unrelenting approach to work, but that he was also considered a lone wolf and eccentric even by Woods Hole standards. Hawkins was wrapped in his shell as tightly as a barnacle and the hard edge behind his easy quiet-spoken manner made some people nervous.

“Hell, I already know what they think,” Hawkins said with a shrug. “They think I’m weird.”

Snowy rolled his eyes. “Weirdness isn’t exactly in short supply in these parts.”

Snowy had a point. The tiny village at the heart of one of the world’s most prestigious centers of ocean exploration and research was loaded with brilliant oddballs.

They parted company at the dock and Hawkins got into the 1978 three-quarter ton Ford he had painstakingly restored. He turned onto Water Street, the main drag that ran along the harbor, passed the old stone Candle House that was built in the village’s whaling days, and took a right near the Georgian-style building that housed the Marine Biological Laboratory.

A few blocks back from the harbor, Hawkins turned onto a crushed shell driveway and drove into the former carriage house of a two-story mansard-roofed Victorian summer place. As he got out of the truck and walked toward the house with a slight limp, a dog ran down the porch steps and slammed into his thigh so hard that Hawkins almost lost his footing. He reached down and scratched the ears of the squirming golden retriever. The dog was a female he had adopted from the Animal Rescue League. He had called her Quisset, meaning Star of the Sea in the language of Cape Cod’s Wampanoag Indians.

With Quisset glued to his leg, Hawkins went up the porch steps and opened the unlocked door. He went into the kitchen, put the whiskey in a cabinet, and gave Quisset some dog treats, which she noisily demolished.

Hawkins climbed to the study that took up the entire second floor. Afternoon light streamed in through the picture window and reflected off the rows of polished bronze and brass diving helmets lined up in display cases according to year of manufacture. The helmets ranged from an antique Sander built in 1917 to a group of Discos dating back to the 1940s.

Hawkins had collected other examples of antique dive paraphernalia as well: a weight belt patented in 1898, dive lamps, single lens masks, air pumps, Frankenstein-type boots and double hose regulators like those used by Jacques-Yves Cousteau. The wall opposite the helmets had floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books and scale models of the shipwrecks that Hawkins’ non-profit sea exploration company had discovered.

Hawkins was fascinated by the unwieldy gear both as functional art and for what it said about the earliest divers. Ever since man had crawled out of the sea humans had seemed compelled to return to their salty origins. There was no other reason a person would leave his warm, earth-bound haunts, don hundreds of pounds of encumbering equipment and descend into a hostile environment at the end of an air hose.

Hawkins flicked on a sound system. A tune by the legendary blues guitarist Mississippi John Hurt — just one entry in Hawkins’ extensive collection of blues — issued from four reproduction dive helmets that housed quadraphonic speakers.

He was carrying a laptop computer that had been monitoring Fido’s video cameras. He pushed aside a dive knife made by Siebl that he used as a letter-opener, placed the computer on a sturdy desk built of polished driftwood and settled into a chair made from the welded links of a tugboat hawser.

The dog had followed him to the study and now rested her chin on his knee.

Hawkins scratched the dog’s head and thought about Snowy’s comment. He was right about Hawkins being unsociable. His real problem was his inability to trust in his fellow humans. He preferred dealing with robots. If they failed him, he could replace a part.

Maybe he should have gone to the bar. The thought made him thirsty. He said, “Beer.”

A loud hum came from a small atmospheric dive suit in a corner of the room. The suit was a scale model used to test a full-size ADS, basically an underwater vehicle with mechanical arms and legs. Hawkins had acquired the suit at auction and installed a refrigeration unit, an electric motor to give the scale model mobility and a basic audio program to pick up his commands. He had named it Mitch after the puffy-limbed Michelin man it resembled.

Mitch moved toward Hawkins on the powered roller skates attached to the bottom of its boots and stopped near his desk. Hawkins flipped back the transparent helmet and a light went on, revealing a six-pack of beer. He reached in for a bottle and said, “Thanks.”

He lowered the helmet and the refrigerator rolled back to the wall. The wonders one can accomplish with an MIT education, he mused. He stared at the three-foot-high figure.

“Maybe I am as weird as people say.”

He took a couple of slugs of beer, then booted up the computer and watched the video taken by the submersible’s camera.

Hawkins had wanted to develop a robot that would be aware of its surroundings and change its environment when it had to. Fido had not only detected the barriers blocking its way through the maze but had also figured out how to remove them. By observing, analyzing and reacting, the little robot had come one step closer to putting real artificial intelligence on the bottom of the ocean.

Hawkins was deep into the intricacies of a communications link paradigm when his phone chirped a computerized rendition of B Flat blues. The caller ID said the call was from out of the area. He pushed the speaker button and said hello.

“This is Jack Kelly. Don’t hang up on me, Matt.”

Matt recognized the knife-sharp voice even though he hadn’t heard it in years.

He smiled. “Why would I hang up on my favorite former commanding officer?”

“Nice try, Matt. I saw the letter you sent to the navy. It should have been written on asbestos.”

Hawkins recalled that the letter had used the word “incompetent” more than might have been necessary to prove his point.

“Okay, the letter was a little over the top. But I’ve mellowed, Jack. I don’t hate the navy brass 24/7. Only on damp days. If I count the twinges in my left leg I can forecast a storm right down to Beaufort scale.”

“Glad I caught you on a good day, lieutenant. Got a big favor to ask. Urgent matter. Can you come to the War College today?”

The naval war college in Newport, Rhode Island was about an hour’s drive from Woods Hole.

“What’s going on, Jack? Does the navy want to make me an admiral?”

“Haven’t a clue. I’m only the messenger.”

Hawkins glanced at his computer. “I’m in the middle of a big project, Jack.”

“Be forewarned that they intend to keep bugging you. If you say no to me, they’ll go up the line of command to the Secretary of Defense.”

“Who’s they?”

“You know better than to ask me that. Consider this a personal favor to me.”

“Like to accommodate you, commander, but my dealings with the navy are strictly arm’s-length these days. The only guys I’ll talk to are the tech people and the bean counters. Unless this has to do with my robotics work, it’s nothing that will interest me. Sorry.”

“Okay. Call this number if you want to reconsider.”

Hawkins grunted a reply, hung up and stared into space. He’d always gotten along with Kelly. Not necessarily one of the good guys, but he wasn’t bad either. But it had been five years since Hawkins had pulled a paycheck as a navy SEAL. It made no sense.

He wasn’t joking when he told Kelly that the pain in his leg predicted the approach of nasty weather. The dampness in the air that presaged rain affected the metal bolts that held his bones together. He got up and went to the window.

The sky had gone from blue to tangerine.

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.

In mariner’s lore, a reddish-orange sky in the evening was the sign of good weather. There was only one problem. Hawkins’ leg was twanging like a bluesman plucking a guitar string, and in his experience, the sensation meant only one thing.

A storm was on its way.