Ultra Deep

Chapter One

“Respectfully, General Oberstev, I cannot…”

“Ah, but Pyotr Nicholavich, you can.” Dmitri Oberstev was not in the mood for defeatism. He did not allow negativism to crowd his own thoughts, and he deplored it in others, no matter their talents and capabilities.

“Yes. Certainly, the problem is not insurmountable, General, but not in the time allotted.”

Oberstev turned to the windows overlooking the control center. Below him, he saw that most of the technicians were seated before their consoles. His aide, Colonel Cherbykov, meandered through the center, stopping to talk to controllers or to inspect information readouts. Many of the monitors, and the large screen at the end of the room, currently displayed a two-mile distant view of the A2e on the launch pad. Actually, it was yet another variant of the A2, though it had not been officially designated. If it were up to him, Oberstev would call it the A2d. The A2 was the orbit-achieving workhorse of the Strategic Rocket Forces, with over a thousand successful launches since its inception.

Floodlights lit the gantry and the area immediately surrounding it with a glaring whitewash. A mist from transferring fuels swirled about the steel skeleton of the gantry, quite ghostly in the night. Beyond the pad was only darkness, with a sparse sprinkling of stars. Dawn took longer to arrive in the latitudes of the Arctic Circle, where the Plesetsk Cosmodrome was located.

Though smaller than the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kazakhstan Republic, Plesetsk was still a large operation. From its forty-plus launch pads, it managed to launch at least one rocket a week. Winter launches were commonplace. Most of the payloads were military, ranging from scientific experiments to Salyut photo-reconnaissance satellites.

While Col. Gen. Dmitri Ivanovich Oberstev was not in charge of the cosmodrome, he did have total control over the Soviet Celestial Laboratory Project, called Red Star, and the A2s assigned to him departed the earth at his discretion.

He turned back to the scientist. “It is September the first, Pyotr Nicholavich.”

“Yes, General.”

“It is five-twenty in the morning.”

Pyotr Piredenko nodded his agreement.

“The A2e is scheduled to lift off at eight o’clock. It is the primary event in a month-long celebration of the New Order.”

“I am aware of that, General Oberstev.”

“Not to mention that it carries a significant component for the laboratory.”

“That worries me,” Piredenko said. “I should not like to lose it.”

“We cannot disappoint Moscow.”

“We could very well disappoint Moscow, if the A2e malfunctions.” There was an uncharacteristic resolve in Piredenko’s tone. He did not normally resist the Red Star project director’s wishes.

Oberstev grimaced his displeasure. He asked, “What is the success ratio of the A2?”

“Very high,” Piredenko said, “but we have never attempted a payload of this weight.”

“Soviet space vehicles are celebrated for their massive payloads,” the general argued. “Besides, the boosters will more than compensate for the additional mass. Your very own computers say as much, Director.”

“This configuration is untried on the A2. For that reason, we must not ignore any warning at all, General.”

There was some truth in what the director of the Flight Data Computer Center had to say. For the first time in the Soviet Red Star program, large booster rockets had been attached to the sides of the A2e, an imitation of the American Titan III, in order to provide the initial thrust necessary to raise the oversized payload module into orbit.

Oberstev surveyed the earnest look on the computer scientist’s face and almost reversed his decision to proceed. He had the authority to do so, but others in higher places depended upon him. Moscow had ordered a live telecast of the launch for the citizens of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The event was a rarity, and no one in the Kremlin would appreciate having it canceled. Moreover, they would remember for a long time, and in a negative light, the name of Dmitri Oberstev.

By appearance, the scientist and the general should have switched roles. Piredenko was squat and blocky, with a square-cut face. His outsize nose appeared chiseled from granite. His dark brown hair was cut short. American football coaches would have been interested in the wide and muscular shoulders straining at his white jacket.

The general, who had graduated from Moscow University in aerospace engineering, was slight of stature, barely topping one-and-a-half meters. He wore spectacles with thick lenses, optically enlarging his hazel eyes to gargantuan proportions. They seemed all-seeing. His hair had gone sparse and gray shortly after his sixtieth birthday. Despite his diminutive appearance, however, Oberstev had a firm grip on his authority, which derived, not only from his rank and his knowledge of aerospace, but also from his many friends and acquaintances among the members of the Military Council of Command and Staff of National Air Defense. Not to be forgotten, either, was his brother, a senior deputy to the new chairman of the Central Intelligence Service, the CIS.

Since the days of the ill-advised — in Oberstev’s mind — coup attempt, of course, the CIS and the military had suffered dramatic losses in influence, as well as numbers. The Russian Republic was the dominant member of the remaining republics, but the loose federation of the Commonwealth remained in place to govern those activities of a more encompassing nature, such as space exploration.

The general felt, however, that he had risen to his present position almost solely on his own ability, rather than through the intervention of friends and relatives. Wherever it was possible, he attempted political neutrality. He took a great deal of pride in his achievements and in his capacity for understanding and managing people. There were many methods of obtaining cooperation and satisfying goals.

Oberstev looked at the red numerals of the large digital readout located to the right of the main screen in the control room: Time to Launch: 02:18:43.

Down on the main floor, Colonel Cherbykov was hunched over the console that monitored rocket motor telemetry transmissions from the A2e. He stood upright and looked up at Oberstev, shaking his head minutely.

Oberstev’s observation room overlooking the Number Two Fire Control Center was small, containing four overstuffed leather chairs, two side tables, a sideboard containing a large silver teapot, and a small communications console. Oberstev crossed to the chair next to the console and settled into it.

“All right, Director Piredenko. You say the primary flight control computer is malfunctioning?”

“The telemetry we are receiving indicates that to be the case, yes. In one of the subsystems.”

“But the secondary and tertiary backup computers appear to be normal?”

Piredenko nodded his blunt head. “That is correct.”

“And yet, you would not proceed without the use of the primary machine?”

“I would not, General.”

“What is the nature of the malfunction?”

“It appears that the interface which balances the thrust of the main motor against the booster motors is out of synchronization. It is a programming problem.”

“So that you may investigate the problem from your computer center, without boarding the rocket?”

“That is true.”

“And what would you do?”

“First of all, compare the programs of all three computers. Perhaps there is simply a misstated instruction in the primary programming. If so, General, the correction will be quickly made.”

“And if not?”

“Then we must examine all of the programming documentation.”

“Or proceed utilizing the secondary computer,” Oberstev suggested.

The director winced.

“I will suspend the countdown for one hour. No longer.”

Shaking his head sadly, the director scuttled for the door. He was a brilliant man, and Oberstev had no doubt that the crunch of time would urge him toward a successful resolution.

Oberstev lifted the telephone handset from its cradle on the console next to him.

The operator responded immediately. “Yes, Comrade General?”

“Tell the launch director to report to me, then connect me with the office of the First Deputy Commander in Chief.”

Oberstev hated making the call to General Burov. Failures or delays were direct threats to his pride and his well-being. He detested the necessity of such admissions.

Chapter Two

Carl Unruh was Deputy Director for Intelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency. As far as he was concerned, his only vanity was the twice-weekly touch-up of the gray at the temples of his dark brown hair. He did not know why he did it. Miriam thought he would look more distinguished if he let the gray shine through.

Other than that, he had come to accept his fifty-three years, the slight paunch protesting his belt, the enlarging bags under his green eyes, the desire for just a few more minutes after the alarm rang. He had also come to accept that most of the desires he had had in twenty-seven years with the CIA, six of them in the operations directorate, were bound to go unfulfilled in his lifetime.

His alarm went off at ten-thirty at night. He had napped for two hours on the sofa in his office. Unruh groaned aloud, pushed himself off the couch, and went into his bathroom to wash his face and shave. Donning a fresh shirt and one of the ultraconservative ties that Miriam picked out for him, Unruh got a fresh pack of Marlboros from his middle desk drawer. He lit one while putting on his suit coat, took three quick drags, and put it out.

He had quit smoking three years before and had been working on it ever since.

He left his office, locking the door behind him, and walked the quiet hall toward the elevators. The doors of all the offices were painted different colors. He thought the decor was asinine.

He took the elevator down to NPIC’s floor and got off to find Jack Evoy standing in the hallway with a Coke can in his hand.

Evoy headed the National Photographic Interpretation Center. He always had a harried look, pulled as he was by the NPIC’s mission to provide photographic analysis gathered from overhead reconnaissance for the entire intelligence community — CIA, DIA, NSA, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, FBI, State, Treasury. All of the acronyms and agencies thought they had first priority.

Evoy’s office was staffed by both civilian and military experts, but he was a civilian, having come up through the ranks in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He was something of a diplomat when it came to saying, “No.” Built along the lines of a greyhound, he was lanky and tall, with a jutting jaw. His suits, though tailored, always seemed too large for him.

“Want a Coke, boss?” Evoy called almost anyone he favored, who was in a superior position, “boss.” His true superior was the Deputy Director for Science and Technology.

“If it has Scotch in it,” Unruh told him.

“Ugh. Sorry, can’t help you.”

“That’s pretty poor social preparation.”

“New austerity, boss.”

Unruh tilted his head down the hall to where a conference room had been set up as an observation post. Light from the room spilled through the open door into the corridor, and he could hear muffled voices. “Are we on time?”

“As far as we can tell, Carl.” Evoy looked at his watch. “Nine minutes, and we’ll know.”

“I wish to hell these people would start launching at civilized hours.”

“It’s a civilized time at Plesetsk.”

“Nothing’s civilized at Plesetsk.”

The two men walked down the hall together and turned into the conference room. It was large, with a boat-shaped table and twenty chairs taking up the center. At the far end, a large screen built into the wall was glowing. An outline map of the Asian continent, along with latitudinal and longitudinal lines, was imposed upon it, and a black circle identified the Plesetsk Cosmodrome close to the Arctic Circle. Major cities were pinpointed by black dots, to provide additional orientation.

Three of Evoy’s staff people toyed with two portable consoles that had been wheeled into the room.

“We’re watching this symbolically,” Evoy said. “All my data feeds will be interpreted by the computer, then shown on the screen.”

“What have you got in place as sources?”

“There’s a Teal Ruby in polar orbit that will give us infrared tracking. The Rhyolite in geo-stationary orbit over the Indian Ocean will help out, as will the Aquacade now cruising the Pacific.”

All of the satellites were sophisticated beyond any dream Unruh might have had as a boy who reveled in reading Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. They captured their imagery in almost any level of detail and spat it out in the general direction of a communications satellite which grabbed it and relayed it around the world, then delivered it to friendly ground stations.

“How about NSA?” Unruh asked.

The National Security Agency, the largest of the intelligence agencies, was located at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. Beyond the development of communications security, it was responsible for foreign intelligence gathering in the electronic communications realm. The NSA broke cryptographic codes regularly and listened in on the rest of the world through its own network of spy satellites.

“They’re up and running on the frequencies we’re interested in. They’ll send us any pertinent voice or telemetry data on the second console over there.”

Unruh went to a small side table and poured himself a cup of coffee from an insulated pitcher. He carried it to the table and sat down.

Evoy sat down beside him.

They waited.

The operator of the second console looked back at them.

“Mr. Evoy, the countdown has been suspended.”

“Shit,” Unruh said.

“For how long?” Evoy asked.

“Hold on.” The operator spoke into his headset. After a short conversation with whomever was doing the monitoring out at Meade, he said, “Looks like about an hour. They’ve got an intercept of voice communications between the control tower and the chase planes. The pilots have been told to stand down for an hour.”

Unruh said, “I may stretch out on your table and go to sleep.”

“Don’t scratch it, huh?”

“You’re a lousy host,” Unruh complained.

“You know, Carl, we monitor every damned launch the Soviets make as a matter of routine. What’s so special about this one that the DDI wants to watch?”

“Our assets in place tell us it’s another component package for the Red Star space station.”

“So? They’ve been working on that station for two years. Hell, boss, they’ve been running a regular UPS freight service to it.”

“This one’s got a nuclear package, Jack.”

Dane Brande stood spread-legged on the bridge of the Gemini, gripping the brass rail that ran across the width of the forward bulkhead with both hands. The safety glass of the windshield panes was canted forward at the top, and several sections had been cranked open at the bottom. A salt-tasting breeze whispered through the bridge area, rustling the papers clamped in clipboards hanging on the rear bulkhead.

Below him, the short foredecks of the twin hulls rose and fell with the contours of the Caribbean Sea. Brande guessed the seas were running at four feet, long and smooth swells that rolled under Gemini without bothering to whitecap. The only wind was that created by the ship’s passage. Identical fans of white spray flared from the twin bows. The water passing through the wide gap between the hulls appeared translucent, but there was nothing to be seen in the depths.

Ahead, for as far as he could see in the darkness, the ocean appeared entirely empty. When they had left Houston just after noon, a tall stand of cumulus had been building in the northwest, but nothing had come of it so far.

“We should be picking up something on radar soon, Dane,” Jim Word said. Word was the captain of the 240-foot research vessel Gemini and her sixteen-man-and-woman crew complement. He stood a few paces behind Greg Mason, who was manning the helm station located at the forward center of the bridge, three feet back from the windshield.

“What are we making, Jim?”

“Still at the top end, twenty-six knots.”

Brande went back to staring at the invisible horizon. The stars were clear and cold. A phosphorescent glow below the surface off to starboard suggested a school of fish.

“For someone who’s spent so much time at sea, Chief, you’re not very patient,” Word said.

“I hate waiting rooms.”

The theme song from the The Bridge Over the River Kwai, whistled through a chipped front tooth, announced the imminent arrival of Maynard Dokey, expectedly called ʻOkey.ʼ He emerged from the curtained hatchway to the radar/sonar room, gripping his omnipresent coffee mug. The mug sported a picture of two whales amorously eyeing each other, communicating in question marks. Okey Dokey was as well known for his personally designed mugs and T-shirts as he was for his expertise with a screwdriver, a computer, and an electronic schematic.

Today’s T-shirt was conservative. No artwork, just the motto, WANNA SCREW? Dokey was fond of questions, and many of the women working for Brande’s Marine Visions Unlimited had taken to wearing shirts that screamed, NO! in various fonts and styles.

“Ringling Brothers’ train got there ahead of us,” Dokey said.

Brande turned to look at him. “A real circus, huh?”

“Radar shows twelve boats are in the area,” Dokey told him.

“I’ve got ten bucks says eleven of them are only getting in the way.”

“That’s not a bet,” Word said. “That’s your typical moneymaker.”

“How far?” Brande asked.

“Call it nine miles to first contact, Dane.”

“Do you think George Dawson has really got something?” Word asked.

“I hope so,” Brande said. “We need the contract.”

George Dawson, who captained the salvage vessel Grade, had called Brande at his San Diego office early that morning. Brande had asked four questions, proposed a percentage, then called Dokey, then called United Airlines for reservations. Fortunately, the Gemini was in Houston for service and supply after a three-month surveying stint for the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office. He had called Jim Word to warn him of their arrival in Houston as he and Dokey left the office for San Diego International Airport.

When the running and anchor lights of a large flotilla of vessels appeared ahead of them, Brande opened the side door and stepped out onto the small starboard bridge wing. Directly behind him, a ladder descended to the main deck. He leaned into the railing and felt the Gemini shift slightly as Mason altered course slightly to port. Crew members, male and female, appeared on the narrow side deck from cabin and work areas and moved to the railings to watch their arrival.

The open gridwork on which he stood thrummed with the vibration from the big diesel engines. The vibration died away as they neared the motionless boats and Word ordered the throttles retarded.

It looked like a small community, a village on the plains. Each of the boats in the cluster had its deck lights illuminated, along with a few searchlights, and the whole area had a moonlit quality to it. As the Gemini approached at ten knots, Brande saw people moving about on board most of them. There was a wide variety of craft represented: several salvage vessels, an oceangoing tug, and power cruisers of various length. Most of them were aged. He couldn’t miss Curtis Aaron’s Justica. It was a thirty-year-old, sixty-foot Hatteras, barely refurbished to seaworthiness. The Justica was painted white, with four-foot-high, squared-off black letters painted along each side of its hull: OCEANS FREE. The Justica was the Atlantic and Caribbean representative of Aaron’s zealous organization. On the Pacific side, it was the Queen of Liberty.

When they were a quarter-mile away, a vessel near the center of the cluster blinked its anchor light. Mason eased off on the throttles some more and threaded his way through the gaggle of boats toward the broad-beamed salvage boat, Grade. It was 160 feet long and, though elderly, in excellent condition. The Gemini dwarfed it as she came alongside. Crew members fore and aft suspended fenders over the side to keep the hulls from scraping each other, then grabbed the lines thrown to them. The research vessel was snugged up against the salvage boat.

Captain Word deployed the cycloidal propellers. Under both bows and both sterns of the Gemini’s twin hulls, flush panels folded open and the cycloidal propellers — appearing like oversized egg beaters — were extended downward. The propulsion system, modeled after that utilized on the U.S. oceanographic research ship Knorr — which was used in discovering the grave of the Titanic — made Brandeʼs vessel one of the most stable on the seas. Governed by computer control and driven by linkage to the two diesel engines, the four cycloidal propellers allowed the helmsman to shift the ship forward, backward, sideways, or in rotation in very small increments. Tied into the NavStar Global Positioning Satellite system, the computer could maintain the Gemini’s almost-exact position in both calm and heavy seas.

Brande descended from the bridge wing to the deck, followed by Maynard Dokey.

Brandie Anderson, dressed in cut-off jeans and a NO! T-shirt, and crewing for a six-month period as an intern from Rice University, operated the winch controls which lowered the starboard gangplank to a few feet above the lower deck of the salvage ship.

Brande gave her a thumbs-up as he unhooked the safety line in the railing.

Dokey started to say something, but Brandie pointed at her shirt.

“You’re going to have to start developing a new reputation, Okey,” Brande told him.

“Hell, I’ve already got the best one there is, Chief.”

The two men made the descent and paused at the bottom landing for both ships to stabilize on the same wave for a moment before jumping the last couple of feet to the deck of the Grade.

George Dawson was waiting for them. Weatherbeaten and nearly bald under a rumpled and disreputable billed cap, Dawson had a grin that was face-wide and revealed strong and yellowed teeth. He gripped half a giant and dead cigar in one corner of his mouth. He was barrel-chested and big, standing six-four. Brande rarely met men his own height, but he thought that Dawson outweighed him by a hundred pounds. Brande weighed 215.

Dawson stuck out a big, gnarled fist, and Brande, then Dokey, shook it. His hand was as callused and as hard as the rest of him.

“Damned glad to see you, Dane.”

With a palm-up gesture, Brande indicated the boats around them. “You invite everyone to the party, George?”

“Hell, no. Couple of these guys, Figlon on the Osprey especially, are always dogging me, hoping to pick up a couple bones I miss. The rest of them, I reckon, listened in on my ship-to-shore call to you this morning. Fucking maggots is what they are.”

Dokey looked around the deck. “I thought you might have invited Curt Aaron over for tea, George.”

“No, but the sucker sent over a list of demands.”

“Such as?” Brande asked.

“That I leave the ocean bottom as it is. It’s against God’s will to disturb nature.”

“He’s going to go off the deep end real soon,” Dokey said.

“Sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned,” Dawson said. “Maybe somebody will shoot him and put him out of our misery. Come on, let’s go forward to the wardroom and get the legal crap out of the way.”

They followed Dawson toward the bow along the side deck. Like themselves, Dawson walked with the wide stance of a sailor who knew his world might tilt on him at any moment.

Entering through the pilot house, Dawson led them aft through a hatchway into a communal mess. The walls were painted beige, and several dozen artifacts recovered from the sea bottom were displayed in deep, glass-fronted frames. A bronze urn, flattened by some unknown catastrophe, a saber with a silver-filigreed hilt, a pair of ceramic mugs labeled Lusitania, a brass lantern, a ship’s wheel.

Dawson filled chipped ceramic mugs with strong coffee, and they settled onto benches at a Formica-topped table.

“You’re pretty damned sure of what you’ve got?” Brande asked.

“You bet I’m sure.” Dawson leaned back and picked a manila envelope off a cabinet built into the bulkhead. “Sneaky took these.”

From the envelope, Dawson extracted a stack of 35-millimeter photographs. They were black-and-white. He peeled them from the stack, one by one, and passed them around.

“Sneaky” was “Sneaky Pete.” One of the first tethered exploration robot models developed by Marine Visions Unlimited, the robot had once had a more exotic name, but it had vanished in favor of the current sobriquet when a graduate student from UC-San Diego discovered that the robot’s video system captured wonderful images of a trio of nude female divers.

MVU did not yet sell its working robots, but in some cases, it did lease them. Currently, Brande had seven of the sophisticated and compact Sneaky Petes leased to research and salvage firms.

“I’ve got videotape we recorded from the video camera, too, if you want to see that,” Dawson said.

“This’ll do,” Brande told him as he leafed through the photos.

In black-and-white, the images were stark, the objects highlighted by the beams of the halogen lamps mounted on Sneaky Pete’s forehead. The areas around the objects were murky. The photographs had been taken at depths where the sun did not penetrate.

Dokey held up a photograph and turned it to Dawson. “Cannon?”

“Yeah. That was our lead contact” Dawson unparked his unlit cigar from his teeth just long enough to take a swig of his coffee.

Brande looked over at the photo. It took a trained eye and a good imagination to see a cannon in it. The bottom silt had drifted over most of it, and only the butt end, with a partial knob, was visible.

“We were trailing a side-scan sonic array,” Dawson said, “and got a ping off that chunk of metal. Came back around and got the same ping, but there was nothing else in the area. Hell, I almost decided to skip it, then thought we could take the time to send Sneaky down.”

“Depth?” Brande asked.

“Eleven hundred feet. But I wasn’t going to suit up a diver for one damned cannon. Well, I might have, just to look for traceable numbers. So we roamed Sneaky to the south and found the trench.”

“That’s where these are?” Brande asked, holding up a sheaf of snapshots.

“Right. It’s a steep canyon, and I’m estimating the bottom at maybe seven thousand feet. The terrain on the canyon side is rough, and the ingots are spread all over the side of it, about five thousand feet down.”

Brande checked the photos again. Almost all of them focused on one or two gold ingots. They were roughly forged, and all but buried in the silt. A corner here, and an edge there, protruded from the soil of the canyon side.

“How many?” Dokey asked.

“We got shots of fourteen. Looks like they’re cast at about sixty pounds. Those Spaniards didn’t want ’em light enough for anyone to carry for very long.”

“You get any pictures of an imprint?” Brande asked.

“No. Bet you they’re sixteenth century, though. South American gold. I’ve been through my whole damned library, but I can’t find one mention of a ship lost in this particular area of the Caribbean. Of course, the Spanish lost a bunch without knowing where they lost them.”

“Say we haven’t got an historical find,” Brande said, “on today’s markets, the straight gold that’s visible…”

“Will bring in better than four-point-five million,” Dokey finished.

“There’s more than fourteen ingots,” Dawson said. “Bet on it.”

“How about artifacts?” Brande asked.

“I think we’ll find something. That ship went down in heavy weather, broke up, and most of it tumbled down the canyon. Probably hooked up on a ledge or something. Broke apart in the currents over the years, and spilled everything down the side of the trench. The debris field may be scattered a mile or more wide.”

“You see anything else?”

“Maybe the lip of a goblet. Silver, I’d think. Maybe a couple of ribs from the hull, but they’re pretty well rotted out.”

Brande looked over a picture that was taken from a greater distance. When he knew that he was looking at the side of the trench, rather than down on the bottom, it looked more treacherous.

“I wouldn’t want to risk a man’s life digging into that,” he said.

“Nor would I,” Dawson agreed. “I don’t want to use my manned submersible. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you brought your toys along.”

In addition to the fact that he needed the money pretty badly, Brande thought, but did not mention that. If all he took out of it was a million dollars, he could at least meet the bills for a month. Almost. He had taken greater risks.

“MVU gets twenty-five percent,” Brande said.

“That’s what we talked about.”

“Anything of historical significance…”

“We’re in international waters,” Dawson countered.

“… will be offered to the appropriate museums at our cost of recovery. That comes off the top, before we divvy up the balance. And we have to get that cannon barrel up, so we can look for clues.”

“Goddamn, Dane. There you go again, getting all mushy.”

“Can’t help it, George. I’m a romantic.”

“Get your goddamned papers out.”

TIME TO LAUNCH: 00:04:54.

The main screen view of the A2e rocket on its pad had not changed a great deal in two hours. The first white spray of dawn was infiltrating across the tundra, but there was little differentiation between the lightly snow-frosted plain and the concrete ribbons of roads around the pad, also coated with yesterday’s snow.

There were no figures scurrying around the base of the gantry now. All of the technicians and scientists had retreated to their bunkers.

The rocket was clearly visible without the aid of floodlights. It stood, massive and smooth and black, with a single red star on the upper stage, like a monolith at Stonehenge. Vapors escaped from various hoses connected between the rocket and the gantry. The additional booster cylinders attached to each side were at least half as tall as the primary rocket.

As he watched, Oberstev saw the gimbal-mounted nozzles of the main rocket motor swivel briefly, part of 2m automatic pretest sequence.

TIME TO LAUNCH: 00:04:48.

The console beside Dmitri Oberstev’s chair reported: “The MiG-25s are orbiting on station, General.”

Two MiG-25 aircraft, called Foxbat by NATO, were stationed at 10,000 meters of altitude, ready to give chase as soon as the A2e was launched. Capable of three times the speed of sound, the reconnaissance aircraft would be able to follow the rocket for some distance, up to an altitude of 25,000 meters, photographing its performance. Once the ground-tracking cameras lost sight of the A2e, the cameras aboard the MiGs would take over, transferring the image of the accelerating rocket to earth-based monitors.

And on to the millions of Commonwealth citizens watching their televisions.

On the pad, the gantry arms cradling the rocket shifted outward then retracted. The gantry moved back several meters. Only the umbilical cords remained draped from the gantry to the vehicle. On launch, they would drop away and the top portion of the gantry would tilt back, giving the rocket added clearance.

TIME TO LAUNCH: 00:04:22.

Oberstev removed his glasses and polished the lenses with a linen handkerchief. Resettling them on his thin nose, he looked around his private observation room. His aide, Colonel Alexi Cherbykov, stood at the samovar, drawing tea into glasses set in silver holders. He had chosen Cherbykov, immaculately groomed in a fresh uniform, for his assistant because he was such an efficient officer. Diplomatic, also. He handled the visiting dignitaries with grace and charm, a function for which Oberstev had little patience. The general was far more interested in producing results than he was in the processes — especially political processes — that swirled around his project.

Cherbykov walked across the room, balancing a silver tray on upraised fingers, and presented it to the visitor. Vladimir Yevgeni, a member of the national parliament’s subcommittee on aerospace, absentmindedly selected a glass from the tray. A senior lieutenant whose name Oberstev could not remember, offered a plate of Dutch cheeses and pastries, but was waved off by the politician.

It was Yevgeni’s first visit to the Plesetsk Cosmodrome during a launch, which Oberstev saw as a major failing in a member of the aerospace committee, much less the chairman of the committee.

Yevgeni had pulled one of the leather chairs up close to the wall of glass overlooking the control center and settled his heavy body into it. Vladimir Yevgeni was close to eighty years of age, Oberstev thought. He was an ultraconservative, representing a large conservative constituency. He would have been a coup plotter, then a defrocked detainee, if he had not been in England for a heart bypass operation at the time of the coup. His pate was shiny and smooth, and his heavy jowls sagged like those of a sad hound. His expensive charcoal suit, laced with thin vertical silver stripes, did not hide the flab layered around his waist.

Yevgeni was one of the cadre who supported having a celebration of the Revolution, rather than the New Order. “Our history does not disappear with our evolution,” he had argued in both the national parliament and the Russian parliament. Vladimir Yevgeni would never acknowledge a mistake made by Russian or Soviet people, but his displeasure at the termination of the traditional October festivities was widely known.

Oberstev asked, “Is there anything we can get for you, Comrade Chairman?”

Though the ʻcomradeʼ form of address was growing sparse in the Commonwealth as a result of the Party’s deteriorating membership, it was certainly a requirement when addressing Yevgeni. He was an idealist of the highest grade and surely, Oberstev thought, one of the silent group alarmed at the foreign and domestic policy strategies that had taken radical turns.

“Not a thing, General Oberstev. I am quite content.”

His jowls wiggled comically when he spoke.

TIME TO LAUNCH: 00:03:51.

On the main floor of the launch control center, the overhead lights had been fully dimmed. Still, with the diffused light from monitors, digital readouts, and LED indicators, the center was bright enough. Every console was manned, and from his view from the rear, Oberstev was aware of the tension in each set of shoulders. It was the same with every launch, though launches had become so much a routine. If there were an added zest to the electrical aspect of the environment, Oberstev thought it resulted from the fact that this was not quite a normal launch. The additional mass of the pay-load and the presence of the twin boosters on the A2e made a palpable difference.

He himself had to consciously revolve his shoulders to ease the tightening muscles. He found himself taking a deep breath from time to time.

He concentrated on details to pass the time. He glanced at the main screen, squinted at the smaller screens focused on exhaust nozzles, umbilical cables, and exhaust deflectors. He tried to follow the complicated wording — rows and columns of numbers — on computer screens, but got lost immediately.

He surveyed his people.

The group of technicians was somewhat diverse. The military men were in uniform blouses, and the civilian scientists and technicians wore white laboratory coats.

The launch director was seated at an oversized console centered in the back row. He was smoking a cigarette and speaking over his headset to someone. Oberstev would have a word with him later about smoking in the center.

On the right side of the room, in a straight chair backed up to the wall, was Lt. Col. Janos Sodur.

Pod-Palcovnik Sodur had once been a political officer, one of the toads assigned to a command to ensure conformity with the ideals of the Communist Party. While no longer carrying such a title, Sodur was now an aide to Yevgeni and had been assigned to Oberstev. Less interested in liaison between the space program and the aerospace committee, Sodur was intent upon discovering philosophical meanderings among the men of the Red Star program. His outlook on life was bleak, and his attitude was instantly suspicious. Oberstev detested the man and frequently went out of his way to make his life uncomfortable. Right now, he sat on the floor of the control center, rather than, as he had requested, up in the observation room with the visiting Yevgeni — an idol, no doubt — because Oberstev did not want to listen to the prattle of two right-wing, righteous zealots during the final countdown. Oberstev’s loyalties were aligned more carefully with the rodina, the motherland, than they were with the waning ideologies of the Party.

Also on the main floor, in an extra chair pulled up close to the technician manning the motor control console, was the director of the Flight Data Control Center. Normally, Pyotr Piredenko would have remained in the computer center.

The man was worried, and that worried Oberstev.

TIME TO LAUNCH: 00:03:02.

An overhead speaker blurted the launch director’s voice. “Three minutes to ignition. Primary controllers, report.”

“We have excellent fuel status. We are showing full tanks, and the pressures are in the green.”

“Electrical systems are on-line. Vehicle batteries are fully charged.”

“The gantry umbilicals are prepared for separation.”

“The payload status is within parameters, showing subcritical.”

“Gyros are now spinning.”

“The navigation computers are two-point-two minutes off the launch, but still within the launch window, Director. We can make corrections during the first orbit.”

“The valve sequence is aligned for ignition, high-speed turbopumps beginning to rotate,” the motor control technician reported.

They waited, expectant and tense.

Oberstev expected to have the telephone buzz at any moment, General Burov calling for a situation report.

TIME TO LAUNCH: 00:02:12.

“Launch Director, we have a malfunction.”

Oberstev recognized Piredenko’s voice.

“What is the nature of the malfunction?” the launch director asked.

“The primary motor control computer has gone down. It is self-protective.”

Oberstev leaned forward in his seat and looked down at the launch director, who had turned around and peered up at him.

“General, we are almost too late to abort.”

“Director Piredenko, do we still have the secondary computer operational?” Oberstev asked over his intercom.

“That is correct, General. Along with the tertiary. However, I still recommend abort…”

“Proceed with the launch,” Oberstev ordered.

TIME TO LAUNCH: 00:01:43.

Maj. Viatcheslav Mirakov maintained his banked turn at 500 knots. The twin Tumansky turbojets, each of which could produce over 12,000 kilograms of thrust, consumed fuel like sponges when the throttles were mishandled. The MiG-25 had an operational radius of only 1,450 kilometers.

Both aircraft were stripped of armament, flying ʻcleanʼ They were each equipped with video cameras and video transmitters, as well as the NATO-named ʻFox Fireʼ fire control radar. The radar had been modified by the addition of a rear-facing antenna in order to provide a full 360-degree sweep. The radar range was eighty-three kilometers, and the pilots would use it to follow the A2e.

Mirakov’s wingman orbited in a lazy oval four kilometers to Mirakov’s west.

When he heard the launch director announce one minute to ignition on his secondary radio, Mirakov depressed the transmit button on the inboard throttle handle. “Condor Two?”

“I am prepared, Condor One.”

“Take up a heading of one-one-zero degrees. Now.”

“Confirmed. One-one-zero.”

Mirakov rolled out of his bank as he came around to the compass heading.

The A2e was programmed to lift from the pad, then rotate to the east-southeast, climbing toward the rotation of the earth which assisted it in achieving escape velocity. With the solid-rocket boosters, the A2e would generate a total of nearly thirty million newtons of thrust. It would accelerate quickly, though Mirakov had been told that the thrust profile had been designed to keep acceleration loads at close to three gravities. The engineers did not want to put undue stresses on the payload component.

The launch profile called for the A2e to achieve an orbital velocity of 28,000 kilometers per hour in fourteen minutes. That was over twenty times the speed of sound, and seventeen times faster than the speed of the MiGs. Mirakov and his wingman would have the A2e on their cameras for less than four minutes.

“Ignition confirmed.”

The launch director’s voice was almost bored. He had done this many times before.

Mirakov shoved both of his throttles outboard and forward, engaging the afterburners. The sudden acceleration depressed his body into the parachute and survival pack cushions of his seat. As he eased the stick back until he had a sixty-degree climb, the positive G-forces increased. The skin of his face sagged.

“The vehicle has cleared the gantry tower.”

Several whoops of elation could be heard in the background.

Forty seconds later, Mirakov’s wingman said, “Condor One, I have a contact.”

“Affirmative, Two.”

The small radar screen emplaced in his instrument panel next to the centered video screen showed him three blips, those of his wingman, an aerial fuel tanker orbiting twenty kilometers to the south, and the A2e. The rocket had already passed through Mach 2 and achieved an altitude of 8.000meters. It would pass over his left shoulder within seconds.

“On track, on course. Velocity Mach two-point-three,ˮ a controller on the ground intoned.

Mirakov activated his nose camera. The screen flickered to life and showed him an unending panorama of hazy blue. Two green LEDs reported that the video recorders were turning.

His Mach readout indicated 2.7.

A glance at the radar screen.

He depressed the transmit button. “Two, I show target range at fifteen kilometers, closure rate thirty meters per minute and increasing.”

“Affirmed, One.”

Mirakov searched his rearview mirror and found the white plume erupting from a small black dot. As he watched, the dot grew into a soccer ball. It would pass over him by half a kilometer.

He eased the stick back to increase the angle of his climb.

“Closure rate about one hundred meters per minute,” Condor Two radioed.

The altimeter readout flickered. He was passing through 22,000 meters.

The rocket passed overhead like a shadow through life.

“On course, on track, velocity Mach four-point-nine,” the controller reported.

Again, he tugged back on the stick. The climb angle increased to 67 degrees. The image of the A2e appeared on his screen, and Mirakov immediately used the thumb wheel on the head of his control stick to zoom the telephoto lens to a magnification of fifteen. The rocket jumped in size until it filled his screen. The white-hot exhaust of the main engine and the two solid rocket boosters were almost blinding.

Mirakov hoped that those on the ground appreciated the view.

As the A2e increased the distance between them, Mirakov kept increasing the magnification until he had reached its maximum of twenty.

The rocket was quickly diminishing in size on the screen.

“Twenty-five thousand meters,” Condor Two said.

They had reached their maximum ceiling. His controls felt sloppy in the thin atmosphere. Without directional thrusters to augment the control surfaces, flying at such altitudes was extremely dangerous. Any abrupt deflection in the line of flight could cause the MiG to begin tumbling and spinning.

At this point in their chase flights, the MiGs went into a shallow descent, easing their passage back into thicker atmosphere, while the cameras began to nose up in order to keep the rocket in view.

“Initiate your recovery,” Mirakov ordered.

He eased the stick forward while simultaneously using another thumb wheel to angle the camera upward. With his left hand, he pulled the throttles out of afterburner.

Major Mirakov had already begun to think of this as yet another routine flight when something on the screen changed.

What was it?

The right booster exhaust seemed brighter than that of its twin, or of the main rocket motor.

There. It flared again.

“Launch Control,” Mirakov called on his secondary channel, “we have an anomaly.”

“Report it, Condor.”

Before he could depress the transmit stud, the A2e abruptly rolled on its longitudinal axis and nosed down, turning slightly to the north. The exhaust trail of the main engine winked out.

“Out of control,” a ground controller said. “We have lost altitude.”

“Main engine shut down,” another controller said.

“Jettison rocket boosters,” the launch controller said.

“Jettisoned,” another voice reported.

Mirakov could see the image on the screen. He thumbed the transmit button. “Negative jettison.”

The well-known voice of Colonel General Oberstev came on the air. “Range officer, destroy the vehicle.”

That did not work, either.

Mirakov watched as the A2e slowly accelerated away from the camera’s eye.

Losing altitude.

He estimated that he was 1,600 kilometers east of Moscow, and he wondered if the rocket would impact in any populated area on the eastern coast of the Commonwealth.

Chapter Three

“Son…of a…BITCH!”

Carl Unruh thought that Jack Evoy came out of his chair rather involuntarily, almost like his exclamation. Evoy rounded the big table, headed for the consoles, his eyes staying on the colorful lines streaked across the screen.

“Mark that,” Unruh called to the technician at the console. “Get the coordinates.”

He pushed himself away from the table in the castered chair, reaching for the phone on the cabinet behind him. Lifting the receiver, he punched the buttons for the night duty officer at Langley.

When the man answered, Unruh identified himself and said, “Get me the DCI. Urgent.”

While he waited to talk with the Director of Central Intelligence, he studied the plotting board. From Plesetsk, a dotted purple line emerged, aimed toward the east-southeast. A heavy yellow line and two thinner orange lines also traveled in the same direction. Every few inches along the way, a rectangular box enclosed pertinent data — altitude, velocity.

The two orange lines, representing the Foxbat chase planes, had achieved almost 83,000 feet before curling back and heading for their base.

The yellow line separated from the dotted purple line — the expected track into orbit — at 186,000 feet and almost directly over the Russian Republic city of Prokopyevsk. Abandoning the track the CIA and DIA experts thought the A2e most likely to follow, it had veered eastward.

Worse, it had begun to lose altitude.

The rectangular boxes showed a successive deterioration in both altitude and velocity. As the rocket kept diving, Unruh had been praying the damned thing would burn up, though he did not know whether or not that was a wise hope. What happened to a nuclear payload burned by friction in the atmosphere?

The booster rockets had apparently been expended shortly before the vehicle had passed over the Chinese border.

Unruh wondered if the Japanese Air Defense Force had scrambled. They would have been watching the launch, too, and for a few minutes, the track looked exactly like an incoming ICBM. Panic time.

The rocket was down to 90,000 feet when it passed south of Tokyo.

On the map, the yellow line stopped abruptly at a serene place in the northern Pacific Ocean.

The map suddenly looked quiet.

On the plotting board, the technician labeled in: POINT OF IMPACT-26°20′22″N, 176°10′23″E.

Evoy was standing over the second console, a spare headset clamped over his ears as he listened to the communications from Meade.

He turned around to face Unruh and called across the room, “They’ve intercepted some television shots. It was being telecast live.”

“Wonderful,” Unruh said, though he did not much care. “Just tell me what the hell happened.”

“The main engines flamed out. That’s what cost them velocity. It sounds like they lost all control.”

“What else is going on?”

“The people at NSA are trying to sort it out,” Evoy said. “It’s a bit like July Fourth in hell. The radio frequencies are chaotic.”

After a moment, Evoy added, “They tried to destroy the vehicle by remote control, but it didn’t happen.”

“Anyone mention the payload?” Unruh asked.

“Not on the air in the clear. They’re trying to decode some encrypted messages aimed for Moscow.”

Unruh told the operator of the first console, “Call Defense Intelligence Agency and tell them to get their aerospace and nuclear experts out of bed. We want them standing by. Get someone from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also.” The technician nodded and began to dial the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Unruh held his phone against his ear and waited. His ear was sweating.

“Stebbins,” the Director of Central Intelligence said, from wherever the duty officer had found him. He did not sound as if he had been asleep. “My line is not secure.”

“Mark, this is Carl.”

“Problem?”

“A big one, maybe. The Red Star package didn’t make orbit.”

“This is the one we’ve been concerned about?”

“Yes.”

“Burn up, did it?”

“No. It didn’t achieve the altitude or speed for that.” Unruh glanced at the screen. “Maxed out at Mach five-point-six.”

“It didn’t break up? Didn’t tumble?”

“No, not from what we’re reading. Took a clean dive into the Pacific.”

“Shit. Where?”

Unruh again looked to the screen. “It looks to be some two thousand miles east of Japan.”

“Put me in an American perspective.”

“Southwest of Midway, fifteen hundred miles west of Honolulu.”

There was a pause while Mark Stebbins digested that. Then he said, “I’ll call the National Security Advisor. You get together whatever data you can grab and meet me at the White House.”

Mark Stebbins hung up abruptly. He was not big on lingering goodbyes.

Unruh replaced his own phone in its cradle. “Jack, we want a videotape of the tracking screen data, plus audiotape of all the voice transmissions. Copies of the TV coverage. Tell the people at Meade to concentrate on this event.”

“Are we worried yet?” Evoy asked.

“I don’t know about the people across the Potomac, but I am.ˮ

When the phone rang, Avery Hampstead’s eyes fluttered open. He lost whatever dream had been showing that night, and he could not recall one fragment of it, though he thought it must have been pretty good. He had an erection.

The phone rang again.

He looked at the clock. 12:44.

It was not a good sign.

He shoved the covers back and rolled upright, trying to not wake Alicia and to get the phone before it rang again.

He just made it. The telephone tingled as he lifted it.

“Hampstead.”

“Avery, this is Carl Unruh.”

They had gone to Princeton together, graduate school in international affairs. Unruh had gone spooky, while Hampstead went bureaucratic. It did not mean that Unruh was entitled to middle-of-the-night calling privileges.

“Can’t recall the name, this time of night,” Hampstead said, prepared to hang up.

“Avery, hold on! I’m sorry about the hour.”

Hampstead sighed.

“I’d like to have you get dressed and go over to the White House.”

“This is College Park. We don’t hang around the White House.”

“Please. I think I’m going to need you.”

“What’s this about, Carl?”

“I can’t tell you. I don’t even know if I’ll get to use you, but I’d like to have you standing by.”

“You know what time it is? They don’t offer tours at night.”

“I’ll clear the way. Go to the East entrance.” Unruh hung up.

“Who’s that?” Alicia asked. Her voice was muffled by the pillow.

“White House calling. I’m invited to breakfast.”

“Sure.” She went back to sleep.

Which was almost what Hampstead did.

In the headquarters of Marine Visions Unlimited, one section of fluorescent lights burned in one corner of the office. There was only one office. Except for partitioned-off restrooms, a kitchenette, and a couple of storage areas, the open space was a jumble of surplus navy gray steel desks, black, gray and beige filing cabinets, and desk, straight, and easy chairs in a rainbow of woods, fabrics, and Naugahyde. There did not seem to be any logic involved in the placement of work areas. Charts, diagrams and schematics were pinned to the walls in every place possible. For lack of wall space, one blueprint was taped to a window. There were plenty of windows in the perimeter walls, probably all destined for blueprint draperies.

If a new person came on board, a desk and chair were located in some thrift shop and inserted somewhere on the floor. At last count, there were twenty-seven desks scattered around. They butted up to each other head-on, at right angles, and at oblique angles. From the suspended ceiling, cables drooped to computer terminals and telephones.

Nor was there a functional division within the office. Oceanographers, biologists, computer specialists, civil and structural engineers, environmental engineers, robotics experts and propulsion designers were scattered like birdshot. During daylight hours, when the place was thriving, people called across the room, telephoned each other, kept three and four different technical conversations going. In comparison, Babel was a city where everyone spoke the same language.

The whole place was symbolic of MVU’s organization.

Kaylene Thomas thought that it was very antinaval. She was accustomed to neatness. Everything in its place. A tool for every job readily to hand. It drove her batty.

MVU’s office was on the second floor of an ancient, red brick warehouse off Dickens Street in the Roseville area. The streets were all named, in alphabetical order, for writers and poets — Addison, Byron, Carleton, Dickens, Emerson, working up to Zola, then starting over with Alcott.

The street names offered the only order Thomas could see in the immediate vicinity.

The ground floor of the warehouse was not much better. It was the manufacturing facility for MVU robotic creations, and it was a jungle of machine and hand tools, computers and exotic machines for casting and forming custom-designed parts in stainless steel, bronze, arcane alloys and carbon-embedded plastics. If someone got a hot idea, the various parts of one project were shoved aside, and the hot idea evolved into another mess of copper, brass, fiberglass, and fiber-optic components spread over workbenches, the tops of lockers, and the concrete floor.

From her desk jammed against an outside wall, under a window that needed washing, Thomas could view the Commercial Basin below and to the north. There was not much activity tonight. MVU’s dockside building, a half block away, was dark. Lights on a dock across the basin illuminated a dozen men operating forklifts and cranes, loading a small freighter. Farther to the northeast, a steady stream of airliners launched themselves from San Diego International Airport, climbing westward toward the prevailing winds.

There was no wind tonight. One of the ceiling-mounted air conditioners chattered irregularly, but it always did.

If she leaned back and looked to her right, a window in the end wall gave her a view across the bay of the U.S. Naval Air Station on North Island, also launching a few aircraft, though they were probably more lethal than a Boeing 767. Throughout the bay, she could see the lights of freighters, pleasure craft, and several navy warships that were underway.

The night lights of the city all but washed out the stars in a clear sky.

Thomas’s computer terminal, on the left of her desk, was alive with numbers, and she was getting tired of them. They were all pessimistic numbers.

Kaylene Rae Thomas had a master’s degree in geology and had devoted her doctoral program to oceanography, halfway expected from the daughter of a U.S. Navy admiral, now retired. She had spent two years at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography before being lured away by Dane Brande.

The bait had been his reputation for creativity and her directorship of Harbor One, a seabed laboratory that was only a seedling idea at the time. Five years later, as she neared her thirty-fourth birthday, Harbor One had been operational for two years and had spawned subcolonies. Experiments in resource mining, in food production, and in fish breeding were being conducted in their own self-contained modules located on the ocean floor within a mile of Harbor One. Nearing completion were three connected and oversized domes that would compete with Sea World, Universal Studios, and Knott’s Berry Farm for tourist dollars. She called it Disneyland West.

Brande called it revenue.

At her desk in Hoboville — another of her coined titles — with depressing numbers covering her computer screen, Thomas was busy doubting her future. She was afraid that the time was fast approaching when she should make a change.

She was still young enough, and had built enough of an academic reputation, to find a position with a decent university. Her looks were holding, though she expected to begin finding gray among the platinum blond daily. She kept her hair short, just below the level of her earlobes, for the sake of easy maintenance. Her eyes were those of her father, a pale, iridescent blue, and she suspected that tomorrow or the next day, if she kept reading numbers on computer screens, she would be wearing the admiral’s bifocals. At five-ten, she was tall, and her mostly active work kept her fit, perhaps a bit too lean. Colleagues kept telling her she needed to eat more. Her skin was pale as a result of so much time spent below the surface of the Pacific, and her complexion was not yet ravaged by weather or sun.

Brande never noticed. When she joined Marine Visions, she had halfway expected to find her attraction to its president reciprocal, but Dane kept his personal and professional lives separated. If he had a personal life. He seemed always to be at work on one project or another, and though she had never met a girlfriend, there were rumors of many.

Irrespective of the professional and nonsocial relationship between them, Dane Brande’s form of leadership was one of her problems. Everybody in MVU had a title, but no one apparently reported to anyone else. There was no hierarchy, no organizational structure. Brande was the chief, and that was it. People working on one project shifted to others without an explained reason. Graduate students from various universities were taken on for short stints to gain credit and experience. People were hired on the spur of the moment for specific projects, then were retained after the project was completed. Job descriptions changed daily.

Thomas was hired as Director of Harbor One. That was still her title, and she was still more or less in charge of the sealab, but over time, she had somehow assumed the responsibilities of chief fiscal officer. It was as if the administrative side of the company existed in a vacuum, and it had sucked her in. In a real company, she would be CFO or executive vice president or something. Any time someone wanted to know how much money they had, or when the federal research funds were due to expire, they asked her.

And, damn it, she always had the information handy. She was too organized for her own good.

She looked again at the computer screen. It displayed a summary of current fund balances, expected expenditures, and anticipated revenues for each of the dozen projects now in an active status.

She shuddered, picked up the phone, and dialed 6 to get into the satellite communications channel that MVU leased at exorbitant monthly rates. That was a luxury that would have to go.

When she got the secondary dial tone, she dialed the number of the Gemini.

A gruff voice answered, “Gemini, Mason.”

“Greg, this is Kaylene Thomas. Is Dane around?”

“Hey, Kaylene. How you doing?”

“Fine. Dane?”

“Asleep. It’s after midnight here.”

“Get him up.”

“Geez…”

Five or six minutes of expensive satellite time went by before Brande reached the phone.

“I hope we don’t have another crisis, Rae.”

He was the only one in the world who called her “Rae.ˮ “Kaylene” just did not roll off his tongue quite right, he had once told her.

“Not if bankruptcy isn’t considered a crisis.”

“You’re doing the books, huh?”

“Who else would do them?” she asked. “I’m certainly not paid for it.”

“Give yourself a five-thousand-dollar raise,” he offered.

“Be happy to, if we had it. We don’t. Larry Emry wrote a check against the Titanium Exploration Fund, but we haven’t received the federal subsidy yet. I had to borrow from the operating account to cover it.”

“Good girl.”

“Good girl, hell. We’re going to be short of funds on payroll day.”

“I’ll skip my paycheck.”

“And we’ve got a million-two in notes coming due on the fifteenth of November,” she reminded him.

“I’ll bet we’re going to be short.”

“By seven hundred thousand. Damn it, Dane, our monthly outgo is now close to one-point-four million. Something’s got to go.”

“I can’t think of a thing that’s expendable,” he told her.

“I can.ˮ

“How about a garage sale?”

“Dane.”

“My grandma Bridget used to pronounce my name with that same kind of ice in it.”

“After you’d been a bad boy?”

“Usually, yes.”

“Aren’t you worried?” Thomas asked.

“Something will turn up. Maybe what we’ve got on the bottom here.”

Brande told her about the Grade’s find.

“There’s really gold? It’s an uncharted wreck?” Treasure

hunters in the Caribbean usually came up empty, having found wrecks that had already been picked clean.

“I think Dawson’s got himself a good one. We’ll know in the morning”

“Be careful,” Thomas said, feeling a dash of renewed hope collide with concern. The conflicting emotions were part of her tenure at MVU.

The President paced.

The rest of them sat around the table centered in the Situation Room. Unruh and his boss, DCI Mark Stebbins, sat together on one side of the well-worn table. Adm. Harley Wiggins, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, faced Unruh and sat with his elbows on the table, his chin resting on his laced knuckles. The National Security Advisor, Warren Amply, was sprawled back in his chair, on the very edge of putting his heels up on the table, Unruh thought. Robert Balcon, who was the White House chief of staff, had the luster in his eyes dimmed by lack of sleep.

Fortunately, it was still a small group. Decisions would come tougher when it expanded to include necessary agency people and legislative leaders. Necessary to someone other than Carl Unruh.

Unruh had just briefed everyone on the events at Plesetsk, replaying the video and audio tapes.

“The Soviets have placed nuclear reactors in space before,” the President said.

“That’s true, Mr. President,” Admiral Wiggins said. “They’ve got a thirty-year history in the field. Most of them are very tiny and very efficient, with a lifespan of around five years. They produce a great deal more electricity than solar panels.”

“We bought one of their reactors a couple years ago, didn’t we?” Balcon asked.

“Yes,” Wiggins said, “we did, for ten million dollars. It’s a Topaz Two, and we set it up out in Albuquerque to be studied by the university, Sandia, and Los Alamos people. The reports have been good, and NASA wants one of its own for a manned expedition to Mars.”

“What’s the output?” the President asked.

“Of the Topaz Two? I believe it’s close to ten thousand watts, Mr. President. This one, however, is not a Two. It’s much larger.”

Mark Stebbins said, “It’s designated the Topaz Four. We’ve been following the development for some time, and Carl has the details.”

Unruh sat up straight. “The Topaz Two is six feet by twelve feet in size, and it weighs about two thousand pounds. The fourth-generation model is fifteen feet in diameter and twenty-six feet long. It weighs in at two-and-a-half tons, and we think it can generate up to fifteen-point-five megawatts, based on theoretical extensions of the device we have in New Mexico. We are not certain about the fuel load. Because of its size, we’ve been tracking it ever since it left the manufacturing plant.ˮ

Unruh looked around the table. “We are not certain, either, about the sensitivity of the controls.”

“What about cooling?” the President asked. “It seems to me that cooling is a priority with reactors.”

“The small machines use a combination of freon and heat pumps,” Unruh said. “On the dark side of a satellite, it’s extremely cold, and heat exchangers are used. With the Topaz Four, we’re not sure of the technologies involved.”

“It could melt down?” the chief of staff asked.

Unruh shrugged his shoulders.

“Assuming that possibility, what is the consequence for the ocean waters?” the President asked.

“I think, sir, we’ll have to call in the experts on that,” Unruh said.

“We need a great deal of information, it seems to me,” the National Security Advisor said.

“And fast,” the President agreed. “You look like you have an answer, Warren.”

Amply said, “Call the Commonwealth President and ask him.”

It sounded like a good idea to Unruh.

“Well, hell, Warren. Make it simple.”

The chief of staff got up and went to the door, opened it, and asked for a technician to set up the direct telephone connection, which was governed by its own computers. He ordered someone in the hall to locate a translator.

“What time is it in Moscow?” the President asked.

Unruh checked his watch. 3:56.

“It’s a few minutes before eleven in the morning,” he said.

“Good. Heʼll have had his breakfast”

“He probably had it much earlier,” Stebbins said. “They have celebrations planned for the whole day.”

“That’s right. The first of September.”

“The New Order,” Amply said.

“Not everyone will turn out. There’s still a sizable population who would rather remember the Great Patriotic War,” Balcon said.

While they waited for the telephone connection, Unruh doodled on the yellow pad in front of him. He could not get away from drawing rockets.

The President said, “Harley, while we’re waiting, why don’t you call the Chief of Naval Operations and see what we’ve got operating in the area?”

Wiggins nodded. “Subsurface vessels, Mr. President?”

“I think that would be the best idea, don’t you?”

It took forty minutes for someone to track down the Commonwealth President and get him to the right phone. Unruh and the others listened to both sides of the conversation, which was channeled through overhead speakers.

It took ten minutes to get through the protocol, courtesies, and small talk, what with the delay of interpretation. The two leaders had met in person twice before, and knew all about each other’s families.

Finally, the President said, “We understand that you’ve had a mishap in your aerospace program.”

With barely a hesitation, the Commonwealth President responded, “A minor thing, yes. We both experience mechanical losses, do we not?”

“We also understand that the payload was a … Topaz Four,” the President said, giving away a secret and possibly jeopardizing a source or two.

Unruh flinched.

Stebbins cleared his throat.

“Was it?” the Russian asked. “I had not inquired.”

Unruh did not like the way this was going.

“The reason Iʼm calling, we’d like to know something about the reactor. Maybe we can be helpful in the recovery.”

“I believe, Mr. President, that we can take care of it ourselves.”

“But… ”

“Thank you for your concern.”

The speakers in the ceiling buzzed a dial tone.

Chapter Four

Janos Sodur, a lieutenant colonel, was the junior officer in the room, but he was the loudest, Dmitri Oberstev thought.

The next loudest, his volume squelched by the frog in his throat, was Vladimir Yevgeni, member of the Parliament and protector of aerospace programs, morality, and history.

If not the loudest, Yevgeni was at least the most persuasive.

He had just persuaded the President to, as the Americans termed it, stonewall the President of the United States.

Oberstev was very tired. He had been up most of the night, and the events of the day were not the kind that made his life easier. He had tried to sleep on Yevgeni’s comfortable Ilyushin 11–76 on the flight to Sheremetevo Airport, but Sodur’s incessant conjecture for Yevgeni’s benefit had denied him that.

They were in a borrowed minister’s office in the Council of Ministersʼ Building inside the Kremlin walls, having left their initial meeting in a conference room when the telephone call from the United States was announced. Almost everyone with sufficient rank had trailed after the President. Sodur did not have sufficient rank, but he had an adequate supply of both naïveté and gall.

Oberstev stood by a corner window, listening to the half-dozen conversations taking place. He gazed upward at the high ceiling. One floor up, on the fourth, Lenin’s apartment and study were preserved for visitors, of which there were none. Outside the windows, a light snow was falling, beginning to coat the ground between the Ministersʼ Building and the tall structure next to it, the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet. From the corner office, Oberstev had a view of the Senate Tower in the wall. On the other side of it was the Lenin Mausoleum, facing Red Square.

Under the weak light of day, the gold and olive and silver onion-shaped domes glistened with the moisture of melting snow. Oberstev was acutely aware that all around him was the work of artists and architects who had flourished as early as the 11th century. The building in which he stood, uncomfortable in the over-heated space, had been built in the 18th century. While he appreciated the history and the accomplishments, it seemed incongruous for him to be there. He was, after all, driving headlong into the 21st century, shaping its history. A ten-century span, a thousand years. He wanted to be the man who completed the massive Red Star space station. If possible, he wanted to be the man who initiated the first manned expedition to Mars.

Besides the President, Yevgeni and Janos Sodur, there were two national parliament members, six generals and two admirals crowding the room. A delegation of two from the Russian parliament had also infiltrated. Oberstev was beginning to smell them.

He leaned back against the windowsill, removed his glasses, and polished the thick lenses with a linen handkerchief.

Sodur was reiterating for the generals his conviction that the disaster was the result of sabotage. Not everyone seemed to agree with Yevgeni’s aide, but they could agree on one thing — it was a disaster.

“And on the first day of the celebration,” Yevgeni lamented, without mentioning that it was the wrong celebration for him.

“The Westerners infiltrate everywhere,” Sodur told him. “All it takes is a screwdriver left in the wrong place. A bolt partially removed. A…”

“The initial indication,” Oberstev interrupted, “is that the primary motor control computer malfunctioned.”

He was not about to reveal to this group, and at this moment, that human logic — his own — had overridden that of the computer.

“Exactly!” shouted Sodur. “A magnet! The agent had only to drop a magnet in the right location.”

“You are certain that foreign agents are in place at Plesetsk?” Yevgeni asked. “The security…?”

“I am certain,” Sodur said very soberly.

Oberstev shook his head. They always looked for someone on whom to place the blame, looking backward, when the moment called for looking forward.

The President apparently thought the same way. He lifted his hand to quiet the room, then said, “The causes may be examined at a later date. The consequences are of immediate concern. Chairman Yevgeni, you convinced me to tell the Americans that we can solve our own problem. How do you suggest we go about it?”

The old man turned to face the younger President. “The navy has recovery apparatus. Send them to it.”

It was always that simple, in the eyes of the blind.

Most of the eyes in the room focused on Adm. Grigori Orlov, who was commander in chief of the Commonwealth navy. A forty-year veteran, Orlov was heavyset as a result of his skeletal structure, but appeared trim in his uniform. He had large bags beneath his brown eyes, giving him a canine appearance. Senior Commonwealth military leaders who had survived imposed retirement or outright ouster were a strong presence in the balance of national power, and Orlov’s soft-spoken voice carried the weight of that authority.

“We do not yet know the location of the rocket,” Admiral Orlov said.

“But we do!” Yevgeni argued, more loudly and more insistently than was necessary.

“We know the coordinates of the impact,” Orlov countered. “We do not know what occurred after impact.”

Oberstev nodded his agreement and said, “Our last telemetry readings suggest that the vehicle was not tumbling and was still in its original configuration. That is to say, that the payload module, the primary rocket, and the booster rockets had not separated. All propulsion systems had ceased operation long before, but the speed at impact was four hundred and sixty kilometers-per-hour. It may have broken up upon contact with the ocean surface, or it may have entered the water cleanly. We do not know.”

“But you know where it struck,” Yevgeni insisted.

“After impact, it could have traveled a great distance under the surface, and in practically any direction,” the admiral said. “I suspect it could have traveled laterally up to five kilometers. In an area to be searched, that is more than fifteen square kilometers,” Orlov said.

“Impossible,” Yevgeni said.

“I am afraid that Admiral Orlov is quite right, Chairman Yevgeni,” Oberstev said. “That region of the Pacific Ocean is over five thousand meters deep. Almost six thousand, if I am not mistaken.”

“You are not,” Orlov said.

“That will present recovery problems, I suspect,” Oberstev said.

“Indeed,” the admiral told the group. “Our submarines cannot, of course, dive that deeply. The ocean bottom is extremely rugged, possibly preventing our ever locating the wreckage. At present, the only deep-diving submersible we have in the Pacific is at Vladivostok, undergoing repair.”

“We should have let the Americans help us,” Dmitri Oberstev said.

“I agree,” General Druzhinin, an air force deputy commander in chief and commander of the Rocket Forces, Oberstev’s superior, said.

“Never!” Yevgeni said.

Pod-Palcovnik Janos Sodur grinned his agreement. His teeth were stained yellow from his smoking.

The President said, “The Americans referred to the nuclear reactor as Topaz Four.”

Oberstev did not doubt it. Secrecy was the plaything of a bygone era.

“It is as I said!” Sodur claimed. “Their agents are everywhere! Our complacency will lead to our downfall. Only by increasing our vigilance…”

He dribbled off into blessed silence under the stares of a dozen superiors.

The President let the silence linger as he looked around the room, studying each face.

Finally, he said, “Admiral Orlov, do we have submarines in the area?”

Orlov closed his eyes for a moment. “Within forty hours of transit time, I believe.”

“Order them to begin the search. Determine the status of the submersible at Vladivostok. If it cannot be made available immediately, arrange transportation for any other that is available, no matter its location.”

Oberstev thought that Orlov intended to make some kind of protest, then thought better of it. He left the room, shouldering his way through the throng of decision-makers.

“There is another course of action, if I might suggest it,” Janos Sodur said.

“And that is?”

“Leave it there. We need not tell anyone. What will it hurt?”

Oberstev cleared his throat. He thought that his voice might have squeaked a bit when he said, “That course of action is not open to us.”

“Why not, General?” Yevgeni asked.

“This nuclear reactor, Topaz Four, is unlike those that preceded it. I imagine that the automatic controls may have failed upon impact.”

“Meaning?” the President asked.

“Meaning that it will almost certainly achieve a supercritical state.”

“Supercritical state? What supercritical state?”

“The core will eventually become hot enough, then go into meltdown.”

Avery Hampstead waited in the basement corridor outside the Situation Room.

He waited with a dozen other people, many of them in uniform, and all of them under the careful scrutiny of two resplendent and mean-looking marines. Because of some unspoken sense of dire national concerns, or maybe because of the stern countenance of the marines, no one in the hallway spoke to another. In fact, they barely looked at each other. They seemed embarrassed to be there. Or uncertain of which of them had the greatest stature.

After he had been there an hour, someone somewhere had made a decision about courtesy, and the White House-duty marines wheeled a stack of orange plastic chairs into the corridor and distributed them.

Hampstead had smiled his appreciation for a gunnery sergeant and collapsed on his chair. He was dressed in his own uniform, a dark gray wool suit, pinstriped with silver. His black shoes gleamed with paste and elbow polish. His shirt was so white, it looked boiled. The muted gray and maroon stripes of his tie befitted his party — Republican — and his position — undersecretary of commerce.

Though he was presentable, Hampstead had no illusions about his image. He was not handsome in the Hampsteads of Philadelphia family tradition. His face was elongated, and he had oversized ears, with great, dangling lobes. His square-cut, large teeth put William F. Buckley to shame, in a perverse way. He kept his dark hair cut short, though he would really have preferred styling it in a’60s Beatles fashion, to disguise his ears.

There was Hampstead family money, correctly accumulated in steel and railroads, but other than for his education and a Triumph TR-3 when he was an undergraduate, his father did not spread it lavishly among Hampstead and his four siblings. Hampstead earned his living, and he did it in a Hampstead tradition. Most of his ancestors, and two of his brothers and one of his sisters, devoted themselves to public service. It was an honorable calling.

His youngest sister, Adrienne, lived in New York City and promoted gargantuan professional wrestling matches. He loved her dearly.

From time to time, the door to the Situation Room opened and Chief of Staff Balcon or National Security Advisor Amply stuck his head out and beckoned someone inside. The room should have a revolving door on it, Hampstead thought.

He was called at a quarter of seven.

By Carl Unruh.

He had not even been sure that Unruh was in the room.

Hampstead stood up, stretched, tugged his suit jacket into place, and passed through the doorway. It was similar, he thought, to entering an execution chamber. Same effect on the senses.

There were over twenty people in the secured room — Senate and House leaders, Pentagon people, White House people. Unruh introduced him to the group, but did not bother providing the other side’s names. It would not have mattered, anyway. He knew who the President was, and he recognized the congressional faces, along with that of the Director of Central Intelligence, but he would have immediately forgotten the names of all the generals, admirals, and agency heads.

“Mr. Hampstead,” Unruh said, “is an undersecretary in the Department of Commerce. He is responsible for things oceanworthy, primarily in the areas of exploration and development.”

“Thank you for coming over so quickly, Mr. Hampstead,” the President said.

“Not at all, sir. I’m happy to cooperate.” With what, he was not certain.

Unruh indicated two upholstered chairs at the table, and they both sat.

“General Wiggins, would you brief Mr. Hampstead?” the President asked.

Wiggins stood up, and Hampstead vaguely recalled the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was built like an extremely short fire hydrant, and his voice rumbled around large pieces of gravel.

“Mr. Hampstead, first of all, what you learn here this morning is not for public consumption. All contact with the media, or with anyone else, will be made through the White House spokesman.”

“Certainly, General.”

Wiggins crossed the room to a large screen radiating a map of the northern Pacific Ocean. South of Midway Island, there was a red dot. The general picked up a pointer and pointed out the red dot.

“Shortly after midnight this morning, a CIS A2e rocket splashed down at this location directly after launch. It was unintentional.”

The general paused, so Hampstead said, “Yes, sir.”

“We don’t know the current condition of the rocket or the payload, but we do know that the payload was an advanced nuclear reactor.”

“Ooh.” Hampstead did not know whether or not his exclamation was a vocal one.

“We have been briefed by Defense Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission nuclear experts, and we believe that there is a high probability that the reactor may go supercritical, that is, into a meltdown state.”

Hampstead sat upright and placed his arms on the table. He did not know what else to do with them. “Is there a timetable, General?”

“Unknown at this time. Our people are working on it.”

“Have the Russians said anything? There should have been telemetry readings.”

“The Russians are noncommital, Mr. Hampstead,” Warren Amply said.

“I see. Do we know the size of the reactor?”

“Fifteen megawatts or better, at best estimate,” Wiggins said.

That was not large by land-based reactor standards, but Hampstead assumed it was massive in terms of its brothers already in space.

“We think, Avery, that it could put out a massive dose of radiation, on an ongoing basis, over a long period of time,” Unruh said. “The navy oceanographer is double-checking the currents, but seems to think that a large area of the Pacific Rim is at risk.”

Hampstead studied the map. One little red dot on a sea of blue. “The subsurface terrain is intimidating in that region. I’m placing it north of the Mid-Pacific Mountains and east-southeast of Mapmaker Seamount, south of the Milwaukee Seamount.”

“Correct, Mr. Hampstead. Do you know the depths?”

The speaker was in naval uniform, with about eighty rows of ribbons and thirty gold bands on his sleeves. Hampstead thought he was the CNO, the Chief of Naval Operations. Admiral…Benjamin Delecourt. He had a smooth, talcum-powdered set of jaws that jutted aggressively. His hair was gray and thin. The green eyes penetrated like arrowheads.

“Yes, Admiral. Though the region is not fully charted, and there will be trenches of greater depth, I believe the mean depth is about seventeen thousand feet. About three-and-a-half miles. There are recorded areas that reach to over nineteen thousand feet.”

“What does it take to get down there?” the President asked.

“For location purposes, or for recovery?” Hampstead asked.

“Weʼve got to find it, first,” Harley Wiggins said.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the Department of Commerce had twenty-one research and survey vessels at its disposal. Transportation, Interior, and the National Science Foundation had another three, and the academic universities and institutes controlled another sixty vessels. The navy itself had eight ships dedicated to subsurface survey. Hampstead could think of an additional nine research vessels, privately owned, with which he frequently entered into government contracts, as he did with the university vessels.

“There are about a hundred American vessels in the category,” he said. “Of those, very few can operate deep-tow sonar and remotes at the depths we need to penetrate. At this time of year, however, most of the university and institute vessels have been moved to southern waters.”

“The Bartlett and the Kane are in Hawaii,” the CNO said. “I can have them on-site the quickest.”

“The best sonar search apparatus is the SARSCAN,” Hampstead said.

“That’s the navy’s?” the President asked.

“No, sir,” Hampstead responded. “It belongs to Marine Visions Unlimited. It’s a privately owned oceanographic research and development firm.”

“I think the Navy…” Admiral Delecourt started to say.

“Can we get it?” the President asked.

“I’m not sure where they have it located at present,” Hampstead said, “but I can find out.”

“Do that, please.”

“Are we ignoring the Russian effort?” the Chief of Staff asked. “Certainly, they’ll be doing something.”

General Harley Wiggins said, “The DIA has been keeping an eye on their development program, of course. They pioneered the first autonomous undersea robots utilizing acoustical control. They are superior to tethered robots in that the potential risk of damage to cables is nonexistent, and, of course, cable length is not a limiting factor. It’s also cheaper. We believe they may have fifteen or sixteen operating models, but most of them are located at projects in the Barents, Baltic, and Black seas. They’ve been shooting some excellent deep-sea video in the last couple years. The Titanic site, for instance. One of the advanced remotes is aboard the research vessel Baykal, which operates out of Vladivostok. When I checked a couple hours ago, the Baykal was in drydock, being retrofitted over the winter months.”

“So, they have a technological edge on us, General?” Amply asked.

“Perhaps in command and control. We are not certain of their depth capability, but we’re pretty sure that their current remote-controlled vehicles aren’t up to heavy-lift.”

“That concurs with what I’ve heard from various sources,” Hampstead said. “If the rocket is located, it will likely require some heavy-duty equipment.”

“All right,” the President said, “If we find this thing, how do we get it up?”

“The Navy has a tethered robot good for twenty thousand feet,” Delecourt said. “It’s in England, now, but we can get it on board a plane. We can operate it off the Bartlett, but I’m going to have to check on the availability of cable”

“Okay, Ben, let’s get started on something. Deploy the two ships from Hawaii and arrange the transport for the robot. What about submarines?”

“They can’t achieve the depths, Mr. President,” Hampstead said.

“But they could aid in the search?”

“Possibly.”

“We can’t reach the ballistic missile subs,” the CNO said.

Hampstead knew the big missile-carrying submarines patrolled assigned sectors of the sea, hidden even from their commands, and did not respond to communications directed toward them. They had their orders, and they surfaced at predetermined times to accept radio messages.

“Whatever you can raise,” the President said. “I want every potentially useful asset assigned to this. What have we got at Midway?”

“Midway Naval Base has a small task force, the largest ship a frigate, and recon aircraft. Not much help,” Delecourt said.

“Get some of those into the area,” the President ordered.

“How large is this reactor?” Hampstead asked.

Unruh coughed, then said, “It’s a cylinder fifteen feet in diameter by twenty-six feet long.ˮ

“Weight?”

“Forty-five hundred pounds.”

“That includes the payload module?”

“No, Avery, it doesn’t. Best estimate is that the module is thirty-five feet long by seventeen in diameter. I don’t know about the weight.”

“So, the whole thing may have to come up? The reactor hasn’t broken loose?”

“No one knows. And yes, the whole thing may have to be raised.”

“If it were me,” Hampstead said, “making the decisions, I’d want to have MVU’s recovery robots on-site. They’re the best currently available for heavy-lift, and we don’t know what we’re going to run into.”

“Ben?” the President asked.

“The reports I’ve seen support that assessment,” the CNO said, perhaps with some reluctance. “Navy Procurement is requesting funds to buy one.”

“All right, then. Get Marine Visions’s sonar and robots on the move,” the President said.

“I’ll try, sir.”

“Try?”

“I can’t guarantee that Brande will want to move his people into an area that might become radiation-contaminated at any moment. He’s a civilian, after all.”

The President slumped back in his chair. He looked washed out. “That’s a point, isn’t it? Got any motivators in your pocket, Mr. Hampstead?”

“Maybe one or two.”

“Do what you can, then.”

“Tell him he’s to report to CINCPAC,” Admiral Delecourt said.

“That may be a problem also, Admiral. Dane Brande doesn’t report to anyone.”

Capt. Mikhail Petrovich Gurevenich ordered his submarine, the NATO-named Sierra-class Winter Storm, to the surface in response to an urgent message recorded by the Extremely Low Frequency receiver. Because of technical restrictions on the ELF band, which could penetrate ocean depths, but which had very poor data transfer capability, elaborate or long transmissions were not normally attempted.

Sr. Lt. Ivan Mostovets, in charge of the watch, ordered the planesman to increase the climb angle to thirty degrees, and Gurevenich braced himself against the bulkhead of the communications cabin. He reached out with his right hand and pressed the bar on the intercom.

“Sonar, this is the captain. Report.”

“Captain, Sonar. No contacts.”

The bow cleared the surface, and the submarine leveled itself abruptly, tossing Gurevenich upright. He steadied himself by gripping the jamb of the hatchway.

The intercom blurted with Mostovets’s soprano, “Captain, Control Center. Deploying antennas. I will know about surface traffic momentarily.”

Gurevenich did not expect to find other ships in the area. They were three hundred kilometers southeast of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

“All right, Kartashkin, you may transmit.”

“Yes, Captain.” The radioman leaned into his console, depressed the button that activated the transmit mode on his headset, and said, Seeʼnee-dva-sem-zelyoʼnee.”

Blue-two-seven-green, the code they had been instructed to use in the ELF message.

They did not hear the response. Three burst-messages, communications compacted into one-fiftieth of a second bursts, were transmitted by the Molniya satellite, accepted by the data receiver, and recorded. They would play them back at normal speed.

The radioman scanned his equipment. “I have the transmission recorded, Captain.”

Gurevenich punched the intercom button. “Lieutenant Mostovets, take the boat back to fifty meters depth and resume course.”

“Fifty meters, Captain. Proceeding, now.”

As the deck tilted, Gurevenich wondered what was so important that Fleet headquarters would use military emergency channels to send him a top secret communication.

He could not imagine that war had broken out, but that did not alleviate the ball of lead that had formed in his stomach.

Cmdr. Alfred Taylor, captain of the nuclear attack submarine (SSN) Los Angeles, read the decoded message, then handed it to his executive officer, Lt. Cmdr. Neil Garrison.

Garrison, a short and lithe man built for earlier submarines, read through it quickly. He asked, “You think this is it?”

“I wouldn’t have expected it in this political climate, Neil. It’s probably some minor crisis.”

“With Bartlett and Kane involved, we may have a ship down.”

“That’s possible.”

Taylor moved over to the plot and studied it. Taylor had been in submarines for twelve years, but this was his first year as a commander and he was proud of his boat, even if it was almost twenty years old, and he had confidence in his crew. He was a compact man, kept that way by a daily set of exercises in his cabin. The planes of his face had become a little convex in the last couple of years, and his blond hair would have shown more gray if it were longer. He walked with a slight limp, the result of not moving fast enough and catching his leg between a concrete pier and a docking tender.

“All right, Neil. Plot it and give me a course.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Garrison bent over the plot.

“Mr. Covey,” he said to the Lieutenant (j.g.) who had the conn, without turning toward him.

“Sir?”

“What is your status?”

“Sir, depth sixty feet, heading zero-one-five, speed one-seven knots.”

Taylor watched as Garrison drew his line. Garrison looked up at him.

Taylor nodded his approval. “Mr. Covey, make your depth seventy-five feet. I want a heading of two-seven-five and tell engineering we want top turns.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Covey’s tone carried a new excitement.

Garrison stood upright. “At least we’ll shake off a little of the boredom, Skipper.”

The constant regimen of training, meant to keep them alert and on edge, often dulled the edges.

“We may at that, Neil.”

Each dome was two hundred feet in diameter and one hundred feet high, and there were three domes. They rested on steel piers driven deeply into the seabed and were connected by twelve-foot-long cylindrical tunnels. Each of the end domes had an airlock and a docking facility for the transportation submersibles.

From thirty yards away, Kim Otsuka thought that they looked like spider plants. That was because the top, central hub of each dome was composed of an olive-colored plastic embedded with carbon fiber. The superstrong carbon fiber material was also used in the curved beams that radiated from the tops down to the bases of the domes. There were four horizontal rows of thinner structural beams, and the spaces between the structural members was filled with a translucent plastic that had also been strengthened with carbon.

The domes appeared fragile, but she knew better. The construction and materials used were based on those tested for over two years on Harbor One.

Kaylene Thomas called the complex Disneyland West, but the official name was Ocean Deep. It was not actually very deep, however. Located thirty miles west of San Diego and about thirty-five miles southwest of Los Angeles, the complex was two hundred feet below the surface, its foundation embedded in the Patton Escarpment. Dane Brande was not going to put the tourists at extreme risk.

Eventually, one dome would house marine-theme rides aimed at a younger audience, one would contain museums and galleries, and one would focus on marine life. Marine Visions would own the complex, the transportation system, and the operating systems, but subcontractors would operate the amusement rides, galleries, and fast-food outlets. At the moment, the domes were vacant except for construction materials and a hodgepodge of tools spread over the upper deck.

The vacancy was obvious. The interior lighting made the domes stand out prominently against the darkness of the sea as the Voyager made its approach. The fact that the lights were on was a minor satisfaction for Kim Otsuka, for the lighting was one system controlled by the Ocean Deep computers, and Otsuka was the Director of Computer Systems for MVU. She designed the hardware and software systems, often in conjunction with other engineers and scientists.

Otsuka was a Japanese national. She had grown up in Tokyo and had been schooled there. For her doctoral program, she had selected Stanford University. For her career, she had thought she might work for a Hewlett-Packard or a Sony or a Panasonic. That goal lasted until the day after her graduation from Stanford, when Dane Brande called her upon someone’s recommendation. She had never thought she would spend so much of her life on, and in, the ocean. Eight years had elapsed now, gone with such speed she had barely noticed them.

She could not now imagine working in an environment that required business suits or laboratory smocks. Her working wardrobe consisted of jeans and blouses, shorts and halter tops, and occasionally a swim suit or scuba gear. Her short blue-black hair was frequently damp. She was five-two, lithe, and lively, and her brown eyes had learned to laugh a lot. The casual atmosphere surrounding Marine Visions had brought out a humorous aspect in her personality that she had suppressed for the first twenty-four years of her life. She loved what she was doing, and she loved Dane Brande for letting her do it without interference.

The domes became larger and more wavery in the triplethick porthole beside Otsuka’s seat as the Voyager closed on its destination. Around her, the others made morning talk and sipped from insulated mugs of coffee. Svetlana Polodka, the Russian fiber-optics engineer, was flirting with Bob Mayberry, who was director of electronic technology, and who was married, anyway, and had three kids. Ingrid Roskens, chief structural engineer, was bent over blueprints spread out on the deck, pointing out her concerns to one of the technicians.

The Voyager was the first of four planned transport submersibles. Based on the configuration of the submersible Ben Franklin, she was seventy feet long, and almost all of her operating systems were below the passenger deck. Water, trim, ballast, and waste tanks took up the most space, followed by four sets of battery banks. Twin electric motors provided the propulsion. In an aft compartment were the liquid oxygen tanks and the electronics. Forward, on the other side of a bulkhead, was the control cabin and the forward hatch, located on top of the hull in a small sail. The main cabin could seat thirty-two people, and each set of two seats had its own porthole, the better to view the trip through southern California seas. Since she was designed for transportation purposes at relatively shallow depths of less than 2,000 feet, the Voyager had been given a much thinner hull than other submersibles, as well as a sleeker shape in order to increase her speed.

The interior had not yet been finished to the specifications expected by the ticket-paying public. Electrical and hydraulic conduits were exposed along the sides and ceiling. The floor was steel. The seats were covered in canvas. Everything was finished in gray-speckled paint. The utilitarian decor did not bother the work crews who were transported daily to Ocean Deep, however. They had other things on their minds.

The Voyager’s first trip this morning was reserved for the chief supervisors of the project, who would make their weekly combined inspection. The submersible left Commerce Basin at 5 A.M., an ungodly hour, but one selected by the group for its lack of interference in the rest of their day. The hour did not bother Kim Otsuka, for she was an early riser, a believer in dawn.

The first leg of the trip, out of San Diego Bay, was accomplished on the surface and was generally rough. Once into open sea, however, the Voyager dove to a hundred feet, and most impressions of motion disappeared. The submersible could make almost thirty knots subsurface, and the trip took about an hour.

Outside her porthole, Otsuka saw the domes rise to meet her, then slip overhead as the submersible dove below them. The base of the first dome was sixty feet above the seabed, allowing ample room for the submersible to wend its way to the interlock on the floor of the dome.

A pair of steel legs drifted past. She felt herself pushed forward in her seat as the propellers went into reverse, slowing the forward momentum. Pumps moaned as water ballast was forced from tanks below the deck. The Voyager rose slowly toward the underside of the dome.

Clank!

The forward hatch mated with the lock.

Hiss of air as water was forced from the lock.

People rose from their chairs, gathering notebooks, briefcases, palm-sized computers. They began to file forward toward the control compartment and the ladder that would take them up to work.

Kim Otsuka had never thought, either, that she would commute to work by submarine.

Brande and Okey Dokey sat in the two controllers seats located side by side in the manned submersible DepthFinder II. Her sister submersible, DepthFinder, was operated from the Orion in the Pacific.

In the single seat behind them, at a right angle to the way they faced, Brandie Anderson took care of the communications and systems monitoring chores. This was her fifth dive in DepthFinder. This was the way student interns became lifelong oceanographers.

The three of them were in relatively cramped quarters. The main pressure hull had an interior diameter of eight feet. It was one big ball made of titanium alloy, the only way to design a life-supporting environment that would withstand the pressures at 20,000 feet of depth.

Directly overhead was the ten-inch-thick circular hatchway. In front of them were three five-inch-diameter portholes, one forward, and one each angled to port and starboard. Those were the only direct visual accesses to the outside world. Below the portholes were three video screens.

Encasing the three crew members, and further depriving them of space, were dozens of flat panels in square, hexagonal, and triangular shapes, to fit into the inside curvature of the pressure hull. The panels contained gauges, digital readouts, cathode ray tubes, switches, rheostats, and circuit breakers. They monitored and controlled such systems as the central processing computer, power routing, graphic recorders, the tracking transponder transceiver, liquid coolant, alarms, various sonar components, the navigation depth plotter, the doppler transceiver, the main propulsion, the manipulator control electronics, and the altitude/depth transceiver, among others.

Taking a dive in the ocean was not as simple as it sometimes seemed to outsiders.

In front of Brande was a control panel with two joysticks protruding from it. He was piloting the DepthFinder, using the joysticks to control propulsion and velocity in six different directions. He had managed to bring them to a depth of 5,000 feet in slightly over an hour, not that he had much control over it. Achieving depth was a consequence of the amount of weight added to the exterior hull. Unlike submarines, deep submersibles did not change buoyancy through the use of air and water ballast tanks, although DepthFinder II could pump water in and out of small ballast tanks to stabilize her depth. Taking a dive was not as quickly accomplished as it sometimes seemed that it ought to be.

It was dark inside the hull. Exterior and interior lights were left off during the long descents in order to conserve electrical power. Only red, amber, blue, and green light emitting diodes and digital readouts provided illumination. On the outside, total darkness had been achieved at 1,200 feet. Sunlight did not penetrate beyond that depth.

In front of Dokey was a control panel similar to that of Brande, but the joysticks there were used to control the remotely-operated vehicles which could be attached to the DepthFinder on 250-foot cables.

The air was stale, a consequence of the lithium hydroxide blower which recirculated the air to remove carbon dioxide. Pure oxygen providing life-support was slowly bled into the sphere from tanks located outside the pressure hull.

“I think you’re taking up too much room, Dane,” Brandie Anderson said.“Iʼd like to stretch my legs out, but you’re in the way.”

Once inside the sphere, no one stretched anything. There was no room to stand up.

“You can walk next time,” Brande told her.

“It’s okay,” Dokey told her. “I’ll walk with you. We can hold hands and things.”

“Keep your things to yourself, Okey,” Anderson said.

“It’s your things I was thinking about. Hup! Here we go, Dane.”

Dokey had the side-looking sonar powered up and displaying an image on the port video screen, though the sound was turned down. Now, he increased the volume, and dozens of tiny pings could be heard on the speaker. The screen showed the sonar returns as they bounced off a few dozen metallic objects. The cliff was not outlined since they were well below its top.

Nothing could be seen through the portholes. Pure blackness.

Brande leaned forward and cut in the magnetometer, which measured anomalies in the earth’s electromagnetic field. It, too, displayed several dozen targets.

“All right, Okey. Let’s power up.”

Brande hit a pump switch and pumped off enough water ballast to slow, then stop, the descent.

Dokey used a rheostat to increase the interior lighting a trifle, then turned on the big halogen exterior lights. There were four of them, but six million candlepower only cut into the darkness ahead of them by thirty feet.

There was nothing out there.

Brande checked the gyro-compass and saw that their heading was 166 degrees.

“We want about fifty degrees, don’t we, Okey?”

“If we’re where we think we are, that’s what we want, Chief.”

Twisting the knob on top of the right joystick counterclockwise, Brande activated the bow thruster, and the sub revolved to the left.

Nothing appeared in the porthole, and Dokey activated the exterior video camera, putting the image on the center screen. Nice clear picture of black.

Brande eased in some forward speed with the left joystick and watched the screen. Slowly, out of the blackness, came nodules of rock, veined with cracks, appearing blue-white under the halogen lights.

“Cliff face,” Dokey said.

Brande hit reverse for a second, then centered the stick. The DepthFinder stabilized. There was a current, but a mild one. The sub drifted southward minutely.

“I think we’re close enough,” Anderson said quickly.

Brande suspected that all of them were thinking about what could come tumbling down from above. Alvin, the submersible that had been used to locate the Titanic, had once been trapped in a crevice on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge for over four hours at 9,000 feet of depth. Only a successful effort by the pilot had resulted in his banging his way out of the rocky overhang.

“Let’s see what Atlas sees,” Brande said.

“On the way, Chief.”

Dokey took a loving grip on his controls, and the Remotely Operated Vehicle soon appeared on the center screen, moving slowly out of its sheath on the underside of the sub, trailing its Kevlar-shielded cable behind it. The cable floated in the water like a weary snake. Atlas looked like a small sled, a rectangular fiberglass housing mounted on a pair of steel skids. It was painted white with diagonal yellow stripes rising up its sides to aid in visibility. It maintained its position in the water with three multibladed propellers mounted at odd angles — two aimed obliquely upward, and one mounted at a 45-degree angle to its stern. Attached to the front of the sled, in addition to the fixed 35-millimeter camera and the video camera which transmitted its images to the sub via fiber-optic cables, was a manipulator arm designed by Dokey. It had six axes of movement, and the claw at the end of the arm could deposit its findings in a shallow wire basket fixed between the skids of the ROV.

Brande reached over to Dokey’s panel, flipped a switch, and the video image from the ROV’s camera appeared on the submersible’s starboard screen.

The three of them watched in near awe — the fascination never seemed to wane — as the ROV advanced slowly on the cliff face. The image on the screen danced as the robot shifted in the currents.

The face of the cliff became clearly apparent under Atlas’s pair of lights.

“Looks like about a fifty-degree slope,” Dokey said.

“I agree,” Brande said. “I wouldn’t want to work it with DepthFinder.”

The ROV closed to within five feet of the trench side, the details standing out more clearly as the robot approached and the floodlights dissipated less energy into watery space. There was no visible life, no flora or fauna. Anything with life would be microscopic. The soil looked soft, swirled like lava where it had drifted in the currents. The rock outcroppings were jagged. Cracks and depressions in the rock were ebony where the light did not penetrate.

At moments like this, Brande always had to force himself to remember that eons might have passed since light of any kind had shown on the bottom. He felt pretty insignificant, lost in all that time and history.

Dokey reset the range on the sonar readout screen and, using the sonar signals as his guide, manipulated his controls. Atlas moved up and down the cliff face, sliding from side to side. The picture on the screen was monotonous until…

“There!” Anderson shouted.

“Hey, damn, Brandie,” Dokey said. “I can hear you”

It was a corner of a gold ingot, barely protruding from the soil. Dokey moved the robot in close to it. The manipulator arm appeared in the picture, twisting slightly, reaching out, opening its claw, scraping at the earth. Translated through a complex computer program, the arm was controlled from a third joystick on Dokey’s panel and the two fingers and one thumb of the claw reacted to slide switches that Dokey moved with two fingers and the thumb of his left hand.

Dokey was an expert with his toys. The arm and claw moved as if they were attached to his own nervous system.

The claw’s spatulate fingers caressed the earth and soil particles peeled away, drifting slowly down the cliff, raising a tiny dust storm. The gold gleamed under the lights. Gold does not oxidize or rust when submerged for years or centuries.

The thick fingers of the claw reached out and gripped the ingot. As the arm attempted to lift the bar from the sucking earth, the ROV tilted abruptly bow downward.

“Heavy son of a bitch,” Dokey said.

He increased the speed of the propellers to counter the

weight he was trying to lift.

The ingot was stuck hard.

Dokey eased off on the power and went back to digging the muck from the sides of the bar.

Once again gripped it with the claw.

Applied more power to the robot’s propellers.

The bar came out of its centuries-old resting place with a jerk.

Brande could almost hear the sucking sound, though he knew there would not be one to be heard.

“Damn, I’m only going to get one or two of these in the basket, before I have to bring them home, Chief.”

“This is a job for Gargantua,” Anderson said. Gargantua was the nickname for Celebes, the newest, and mostly untried, heavy-lift robot. It was untried because of some problem with its manipulators.

Tve got three hundred and thirty thousand in my sweaty little claw,” Dokey said. “As of this morning’s markets.”

“Don’t drop it, then,” Brande advised.

And the speaker for the acoustic phone sounded off, Jim Word’s voice echoing hollowly as he spoke. “Dane, are you in a position to respond?”

Brandie Anderson handed him the phone set, and Brande said, “Present and pretty much accounted for, Jim.”

“You’ve got a phone call up here.”

“Transfer it to acoustic.”

“The caller says a secure channel is absolutely required.”

“Tell her I’ll call back in a few hours.”

“It’s a him, and he says it won’t wait a few hours.”

“Screw him, then.”

“I’ll pass that on, Chief.”

It did not take long to pass on. Word was back in less than a minute. “He says to tell you that he’s your money man. Or was.”

Brande looked at the chronometer readout on the instrument panel. The maximum rate of ascent was one hundred feet per minute.

“Give me fifty minutes to get to a phone, Jim.”

Wilson Overton had a watcher.

Overton paid somewhat below the minimum wage for his man’s services. The cost ran to about a fifth of Four Roses a week, with an occasional bonus of twenty bucks.

He did not know his employee’s full, or even real, name. The man was known on the streets of Washington as Deke. He traveled a lot, but rarely left the District. Sometimes, he would go as far north as Columbia Road, to the Soldiers, and Airmen’s Home, just to visit. Mostly, he hung out around the Mall, where the tourists were, picking up change.

Nights, Deke spent in the environs close to the White House. Alleys, cul-de-sacs, and the refuse areas behind restaurants and bars were his home, and that was what was important to Wilson Overton.

Deke did not sleep well, and he kept an eye on the doings at the White House. He also kept a quarter in his shoe so that he would have the wherewithal for a phone call that could bring him twenty bucks.

Deke had called Wilson at three-thirty in the morning.

“What have you got, Deke?”

“They’s people arriving.”

“Like who?”

“Like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the CNO, the DCI, the DIA director, a guy I seen before I know is with CIA. Senator Escobets, Senator Hammond. Representative Moore.”

Deke prided himself on knowing who was who in the District.

“This sounds like double-bonus time, Deke.”

“Thass what I thought, Mr. Will.”

Overton dressed, took a cab, and was outside the White House fence forty minutes later, but all he saw were several limos and military sedans parked near the East Wing entrance. The lights were on in the Chief of Staffʼs and the National Security Advisor’s offices, but not the Oval Office.

He guessed the bunch of them were meeting in the basement, probably the Situation Room. That meant crisis, and that meant a story.

He went in search of a public telephone booth and set up his remote office, stacking a roll of quarters on the shelf in front of him.

He started making phone calls.

It was eight-fifteen before he connected with a woman he knew out at NSA in Fort Meade. She had some of it, and she led him to a technician at the National Photographic Interpretation Center who did not seem to think that any of it was classified, including the approximate crash coordinates. He got those to the degree and minute, but not to the second.

Each call led to more calls, and during all of his conversations, Overton made hasty, indecipherable notes in a steno notebook. They were almost indecipherable to him as he thumbed through them while talking to the rewrite woman, Carla Ammons, at the Post, composing as he spoke.

He was almost finished when Nelson, the city editor, came on the line.

“I’m reading over Carla’s shoulder, Will.”

“So, what do you think, Ned?”

“Dynamite. This could affect the whole Pacific Rim?”

“That’s what I’ve got.”

“And it’s down ten thousand feet?”

“I got that from a guy at NPIC. He seemed to know what he was talking about.”

“Sources?”

“I’ve got at least one on each point, two on most of them. I’m going to start calling bigwigs now and ask for confirmation.”

“Okay. I’ll get this over to the international desk, and we’ll go to work. Keep in touch.”

Overton was not about to lose touch at this point.

Not with an item hot enough to wipe out every living fish, mammal, and fern in the northern Pacific Ocean.

Chapter Five

DepthFinder II surfaced two hundred yards south of her mother ship and almost half a mile east of the site of the wreck on the sea bottom.

Capt. George Dawson of the salvage ship Grade had not been born the day before. He had established his holding position on the surface some distance from the actual recovery area, to throw the scavengers who followed him around off the scent.

The scavengers, in fact, had been disheartened by the arrival of Brandeʼs Research Vessel Gemini. If extremely deep diving submersibles were required for this project, then, on their limited budgets and equipment, they were not going to be able to reach any scraps left over, if indeed, anything remained when the MVU crews were finished. Brandeʼs reputation had arrived along with the Gemini, and most of the hangers-on had headed for more promising waters.

When the sub reached the surface, Brande stood up in a crouched position and undogged the hatch, then shoved the heavy cylinder upward and to the side. While Dokey and Anderson shut down most of the systems, Brande stepped up on a seat back and pulled himself up into the sail, trying to avoid the grease that coated the edges of the hatchway. The grease was painted around the joint to ensure a good seal.

The sail was four feet high, constructed of fiberglass, and useful only in preventing waves from splashing through the hatchway when the DepthFinder was moving on the surface. The top of the hull stood barely a foot above the surface of the sea. Mounted on the sail behind him were the transponder interrogator, a UHF antenna, and the depth sonar. There were no remote operational controls, and Brande called navigation instructions down to Dokey.

“Come about to oh-one-oh, Okey. Full speed ahead.”

“Aye aye, Chief,” Dokey yelled back at him.

While the submersible could achieve twenty knots of forward propulsion when submerged, full speed on the surface was about five knots on a windless day and in smooth seas.

The Gemini, the Grade, the Justica, and a dilapidated cruiser manned by aged hippies with scuba gear racked on the stern deck, were the only boats in sight.

The sub turned to its new heading and the twin electric motors whined as Dokey revved them up. Wavelets crashed against the base of the sail. The morning sun was already warm, blazing in a blue sky. There was not a cloud in view, but Brande figured that would change by noon. The heat felt good on his face after the chilling temperatures at depth. The air was warm and salty, but fresh. It tasted good.

“Dane? Iʼm coming up.”

Brande extended a hand, grasped Brandie Anderson’s wrist, and pulled her up and out of the pressure hull. She brought a dab of grease with her, smeared on the left front of her NO! T-shirt, and Brande tried not to notice it. Tried not to obviously notice it, anyway.

There was room for the two of them within the sail, but not much room. They stood on the edge of the hatchway, their bare feet attempting to keep a grip on the fiberglass decking.

The outer hull of the DepthFinder II was constructed of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic and fiberglass. On the surface, she appeared rather sleek, the outer hull disguising the round ball of the pressure hull. Overall, she was thirty-eight feet long, with a beam of eleven feet, and she weighed in at forty-three tons.

The outer hull, however, was just a pretty box that contained the important component, the spherical pressure hull that protected humans from the crushing pressures in the ocean depths. The outer hull was not subjected to the same pressures, but it also contained spherical tanks used for variable ballast, high-pressure air, hydraulic power supplies, and fore and aft mercury trim. Within the outer hull forward of the pressure hull were 35- and 70-millimeter still cameras, video cameras, halogen lights, ballast tanks, and the forward-looking sonar. Aft 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. Anything that might have been considered empty space was filled with syntactic foam.

When the sub was cruising on the surface, only a six-foot width of the rounded top of the hull, the sail, and the twin fins extending aft were visible. As with all of Marine Visions’ craft, the sub was finished in glossy white. The sail and the fins had a single, wide diagonal of bright yellow painted on each side, to aid visual identification.

As they motored past the old cruiser, whose name was indecipherable under the green scum that covered her stern, a bearded wild man with a two-foot halo of blond hair called out to them.

“You bring anything up from down there?”

“We found a rock,” Brande half lied.

“How far down?”

“Looks like it’ll go to seven thousand.”

The bearded man’s significant other, her head and skinny naked torso exposed in the hatchway to the cabin, said, “Fuck it, Slick. Let’s get outta here.”

The beard watched them go by, saying, “Yeah.”

Under her breath, Brandie Anderson said, “If I had a body like that, I’d cover it up.”

“Or wash it,” Brande said, to substitute for some other repartees that had immediately jumped to mind.

“I’ve got Word on UHF,” Dokey called up.

Jim Word, aboard the Gemini, directed Dokey by radio into position astern of the mother ship. The sub slowed, then

turned and coasted in between the twin hulls of the research vessel. Each of the hulls extended ten feet aft of the main deck.

The whine of the electric motors died away as Dokey backed off on the motor controls, maintaining just enough forward momentum to hold her in place.

Above Brande was the massive steel yoke that lifted DepthFinder from the sea. The bases of 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 as well as the main lift cable suspended from the center of the yoke. Brande watched as the weighted cable descended toward him, its length creeping through the multiple block-and-tackle mechanisms that increased its lifting capability.

When it was within reach, he 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 the winch operator braked the cable, then started it in the opposite direction.

The DepthFinder would be making several more trips today, with three crews rotating duty, but she had to come out of the water in order to have new weights installed and the battery trays replaced. Two weights, which fitted into recesses on the bottom of the hull, had been dropped on the bottom prior to their ascent. The batteries were submerged in protective oil in their trays, to resist the encroachment of salt water which could short them out.

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. Brandeʼs 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.

Dokey shut down the rest of the sub’s systems as she broke free of the water, then clambered his way up into the sail.

“Hey!”

“’Scuse me, Brandie,” Dokey said.

“There’s only room for two,” she said.

“Yeah. Ain’t it great?”

The submersible was raised to the limits of the lift cable on the yoke, greenish water sluicing from the hull, then the yoke tilted forward, bringing the sub above the stern deck. Mostly above it. The aft third of the sub still hung out over the space between the hulls.

The winch operator lowered her as deckhands shoved and pulled, guiding the sub onto the rails set in the deck. Flanged wheels were inset into the lower hull, and once they engaged the track, a cable was attached to the hull, and the sub was winched forward along the track. Finally, three lines from deck cleats were attached to the hull on either side, and she was secured in place. Maintenance people — including PhD scientists — swarmed around her, popping open access hatches to the batteries and to the subsystems that needed recharging or checking. Within MVU, everybody performed all kinds of tasks.

Brande grasped Anderson around the waist and lifted her over the sail. She scampered away. He eased himself over, then slid down the surface of the hull to a scaffold that had been wheeled into place next to the sub. He worked his way down the aluminum-runged ladder.

Word came to meet him.

“Any idea about what Hampstead wanted, Jim?”

“No. He was uncharacteristically secretive, Dane.”

They both turned to watch as Dokey slipped under the bow of the sub and crawled toward the sheath that held Atlas in place. Minutes later, he came stumbling out from under the bow with the gold ingot cradled in his arms.

“This one’s mine,” he said.

“Bullshit!” yelled George Dawson from the Grade, which was tied alongside. “Get a saw and cut me off three- fourths of that!”

“Put it in the main lab, Okey,” Brande said. “Well want to examine it for any markings.”

Brande and Word followed Dokey forward and through the centered hatchway into the main lab. It took up most of the superstructure space on the main deck. Workbenches and test equipment were snugged against most of the bulkheads. Five computer terminals were tucked into the starboard, aft corner. The odor of chemicals was prominent. One of the battery rechargers made a humming sound.

Brande found his deck shoes where he had left them in a computer cubicle and bent over to pull them on.

Half a dozen people — marine biologists and scientists — gathered around Dokey as he gently settled his prize onto a workbench.

Brande and the research vessel’s captain continued through the lab, passed through an area of storage lockers and cabins — there were more cabins a deck down, in each of the catamaran hulls — and into the large, open lounge and wardroom area. Word got them both mugs of coffee while Brande settled into the last of four booths on the starboard side — opposite the galley — and picked up a phone mounted on the bulkhead. He directed the radio operator to call the Washington number on MVU’s secure satellite channel.

“Office of the undersecretary.”

There were so many undersecretaries in Washington, Brande had always wondered how a caller was to know if he had gotten the right one.

“This is Dane Brande, Angie.”

“Oh, Dane! I’ve got a message right here. Somewhere. Here we go. Mr. Hampstead is on his way to New Orleans.”

“Must not have been important then.”

“And he’s sent a Navy airplane to pick you up. You’ll be meeting at the U.S. Naval Air Station.”

“I take it back,” Brande said.

“What?”

“Nothing, Angie. Thanks for the information.”

Brande hung up the phone.

Word sat down opposite him in the booth. “What’s up?”

“I still don’t know. But I’ll be leaving soon” Brande gave him the gist of the message.

“We’re staying on-site?”

“Yes. You’ll need to select a couple people to replace Okey and me on the crew rotation.”

“That’s probably better anyway, Dane. Most CEOs don’t get involved in the muck.”

“Hell, Jim, I started this company so I could get down in the muck. Wouldn’t be any fun, otherwise.”

Word grinned at him. “Life isn’t supposed to be fun, Chief.”

Brande smiled back. “That’s what my grandma told me. I’m going to grab a shower. You want to tell Dokey to let go of his gold and get ready to fly?”

“He won’t like it, but I’ll tell him.”

Brande took his coffee mug with him, left the wardroom, and climbed the companionway to the bridge deck. Aft of the bridge were the sonar and radio cabins, then the captain’s, exec officer’s, and four small guest cabins. He refused to call them owner’s cabins, and since he owned the Gemini and her sister ship, the Orion, he figured he could call them what he wanted to call them.

He mostly owned them. Each ship, designed with his insistent and detailed assistance, had been built by Bethlehem Steel Shipbuilding in Baltimore, and had cost $3.4 million. The monthly payments on his research vessels alone ran to $28,000 a month. Crew, maintenance, and supply costs for both ships was $225,000 a month. The luxury of owning his own cabin aboard the Gemini amounted to $4,200 a day. So he called it a guest cabin.

In the first starboard guest cabin, he rummaged through the canvas duffle he always kept packed and in the trunk of his car. He never knew where he was going, for sure, so he was always ready to go.

He found a clean pair of chinos, a pale blue sport shirt, and dark blue, soft-soled loafers. Setting them aside, he stripped out of his light blue jumpsuit — an MVU uniform of sorts — then headed for the attached head. He drank the rest of his coffee while standing under the steaming water. One of the details that had slipped by him during the design phase for the ship was the height of the shower head. It was not quite high enough. Brande was six-four, and the spray hit him directly in the chest.

He weighed 215 pounds, but it would take a major expedition to locate any fat. His wide shoulders and barrel chest were direct descendants of Henning Sven Brande — once Brandeson — his grandfather. Antecedents to Henning Sven, in the Swedish tradition, were confused by differing surnames. Svenson. Petterson. There were others that he had forgotten. Henning Sven Brandeson, at any rate, was the first to land in Minnesota, in 1867. He had dug into the ground, planted wheat, and expected all those that followed him to do the same.

Brande had respected his grandparents, Sven and Bridgette, especially since they raised him from age eight, after his parents were killed in an automobile accident, but digging in the earth had not come naturally to him. What had come naturally was his attraction for, first, Tenmile Lake, then Leech Lake, then Lake Superior. He kept hunting for larger bodies of water. Working the summer wheat harvests and gathering scholarships wherever he could, Brande managed to accumulate the cash he needed to get him to the University of California at San Diego. His graduate schools were also completed by funds from a variety of sources.

As he stood at the basin and shaved for the second time that day — not knowing what was coming later in the day — he realized that most of his life was devoted to raising funds from various sources. He was always hitting up endowments and charitable organizations for contributions. Grant-writing for federal funding was now second nature. Infrequently, he entered into contracts for private ventures, as he had just done with George Dawson. It seemed as if half of his life was spent finding the funds necessary to fulfil the other half of his life.

The effort had brought early crow’s feet to the corners of his blue eyes. The lines from the outside edges of his nose to the corners of his mouth had deepened. The responsibility of providing for eighty-four — he knew more of the details of his business than he let on to Kaylene Rae Thomas — employees had settled into his face, though he tried not to let others share his concerns. Additionally, the sun and the saltwater had bleached his blond hair to near-white and weathered his face into ruggedness. In the mirror, he could see his hand dragging the razor through the lather. His large and blunt fingers, those of a Minnesota wheat farmer, showed the little scars incurred by contact with coral reef and sharp equipment.

Brande felt as if he were fit, but he was less sure of the health of MVU. If the Dawson find proved plentiful, it would help immensely. He would not count on it, however, and in the meantime, he had to mount another fund-raising campaign. He was acutely aware of the payrolls and notes coming due, without Rae Thomas’s prompting.

After dressing and repacking his duffel, Brande carried it out to the bridge. Okey Dokey was waiting for him, and he had abandoned his colorful T-shirt. Wearing an open-collared white sport shirt under a pale blue sport coat, he looked more like the graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology that he was. Dokey’s title was Chief Robotics Operations Engineer, and since the primary thrust of Marine Visions was robotics, Dokey was not often far from Brande’s side.

Dokey flipped a thumb over his shoulder, toward the port side. “There’s an Albatross just now putting down, Chief. What’d we do to get Navy attention?”

“I’m not sure I know, Okey, but it’s courtesy of Avery Hampstead.”

“Good. Maybe he’s got a job for us. Or at the least, he’ll buy lunch.”

They left the bridge by way of the exterior ladder and descended to the main deck. Jim Word had the launch over the side, waiting for them, and George Dawson had come aboard to say goodbye.

“Keep careful count, George,” Brande told him.

“Damned sure, I will. There’s a chip out of that ingot we just got up, and I thought I’d better search Dokey before he got away”

His grin belied the accusation, and Dokey grinned back at him.

“Captain, you don’t want to search where I hid it.”

“You gonna play that way, I guess I don’t.”

Brande went down the gangway and stepped into the launch. He tossed his duffel on the stern seat. Dokey followed, and the seaman manning the helm shoved in the throttles, pulled away from the Gemini, and headed toward the seaplane.

The Grumman Albatross idled its engines a quarter-mile away. A Navy seaman stood in the open waist door, and when they drew alongside, helped them aboard.

Brande and Dokey settled into the canvas sling seats provided in the utilitarian aircraft, and moments later, the twin radial engines were roaring, and the plane was skipping along the wave tops.

The banging in the fuselage hull quit abruptly as the airplane lifted off. Brande watched the Gemini get smaller. Someone on the foredeck of the Justica, probably Curtis Aaron, was waving his arms wildly. Brande could not tell who he was waving at, so he waved back at the man.

“I don’t think that was a cheerful farewell, Dane,” Dokey said. “I think he was casting a spell on you.”

“On us.”

“Sure, spread the blame.”

“You brought the ingot up, Okey. You know Aaron doesn’t like that”

“What good is all that gold doing anyone, buried on the bottom? Tell me that.”

“You know I tend to agree with you,” Brande said.

“You agree with Aaron, too.”

Brande was pretty schizophrenic on the matter of deep sea recoveries. He admitted that to himself. Where the historical significance of artifacts was involved, he did not often go as far as, say, Robert Ballard, who had located the Titanic and photographed and mapped the shipwreck. Ballard’s philosophy saw the Titanic’s grave as historically important, but not archaeologically important. Salvaging the wreck would not have a scientific purpose. The subsequent 1987 French expedition — with American help — caused physical damage to the Titanic’s structure and appendages when they sought out and raised almost a thousand artifacts to the surface.

Brande had watched the telecast in which Telly Savalas supervised the unveiling of many of those artifacts, including the opening on live TV of the second-class purser’s safe. Ballard’s earlier expedition had learned that the back of that particular safe was missing, due to rust, and it was empty. The contents pulled from it for the benefit of the television audience had come from elsewhere. It was staged for dramatic effect, no doubt, but was still fraudulent, as far as Brande was concerned.

In twenty years of diving on wrecks, Brande had let some go by photographed but untouched, graves for those who had died. In many cases, he had brought goblets, china, buttons, belt buckles, and helmets to the surface and turned them over to the authorities with jurisdiction. He preferred to have artifacts of that nature placed in museums, where many people could view and marvel over them. Frequently, expeditions shared the spoils among museums, universities, and salvagers. And state and federal tax collectors, of course. The governmental accountants were always one step behind them. Incan gold on its way to Spain gave up a percentage to Uncle Sam.

He and his crews had worked Department of Defense contracts, locating sunken ships and aircraft, and raising top secret components such as radios, encoding machines, radars, and armament. Brande thought it was better if Marine Visions Unlimited did it, rather than have Russian or Chinese divers combing the wreckage of gunboats and M-14 Tomcats.

He detested the scavengers who, in effect, looted shipwrecks in clandestine dives. They avoided the tax man and the authorities, when the wreck was within state or national waters, and sold the artifacts to private collectors who hid them in their basements.

That was as great a sin as Curtis Aaron’s zealous preaching for the opposite viewpoint. Aaron and his Oceans Free cult had started out as environmentalists, but had turned their crusade into a near religion that banned any disturbance of nature. That included the sea floor and its bounty of minerals, energy, and food sources.

Brande had his own fears for the earth and her environs, but he also thought that there were compromise procedures available. The oceans were invaluable resources, and would become even more so, as the planet overpopulated itself. The overall goal of Marine Visions Unlimited was to develop the tools and the techniques for mining the oceans of metals, fluids, gases, and food in the most efficient and harmless manner possible.

Curtis Aaron did not believe it for one minute. His view was that anyone diving more than one hundred feet intended to molest Mother Nature. Nature abuse.

“I wonder if it would help if we, if MVU, donated some cash to the Oceans Free cause?”

“You mean, would it get Brother Aaron off our backs?” Dokey asked.

“Would I say that?”

“Not out loud. No, I don’t think it would help. Plus, from what Kaylene says, we don’t have much spare cash.”

“Details. You and Rae worry too much about details.”

“She worries about details. I worry about a monthly pay-check”

That was not true, either. Dokey worried about having enough time available to putter in the workshops in San Diego, get involved in the expeditions of Gemini and Orion, shuttle out to Harbor One, and check the progress of the mining station. His robots were operating everywhere, and he loved to see them at work or to take their controls in hand.

For that matter, Brande had the same worries. Never enough time to do all that he wanted to do.

The flight went smoothly. The seaman offered them coffee from a Thermos. The pilot, a Navy lieutenant, came back and talked to them for a while. A few minutes before noon, the wheels clunked out of their housings, and the ungainly Albatross landed gracefully at Callender Field, which was actually in Belle Chasse, rather than New Orleans proper.

Toting their gear, Brande and Dokey thanked the crew, then wandered across the tarmac toward the operations building. The humidity was close to steaming. Brande noted the parked Gulfstream business jet and assumed it belonged to, or was chartered by, the Department of Commerce.

Hampstead was waiting inside the operations building in a borrowed office. He smiled his hello and waved them to chairs. “Coffee?”

Brande checked his watch. “How about lunch, Avery? We’ve had plenty of coffee.”

“They’re going to bring us some sandwiches,” the undersecretary said.

“Geez,” Dokey moaned. “No steaks? Seems to me the department could spring for something more substantial than bologna.”

Hampstead grinned at him, his big teeth and long face giving him a horsey flavor. “Dokey, do you think about anything but food and women?”

“You got the order wrong, Avery.”

Hampstead shut the door and went behind the desk to sit down. Brande sat in a straight chair made of gray-painted metal and gray Naugahyde. It felt like his office.

“I bring you the President’s greetings, gentlemen.”

“Oh, shit!” Dokey said. “We’re drafted.”

“Not quite. But there is a problem. Somewhat of a major problem.”

“With one of our contracts?” Brande asked. Currently, MVU held seventeen federal contracts, all for research projects. It was a substantial source of income.

“No,” Hampstead told him.

Then he told them about a Soviet A2e rocket and its nuclear reactor payload.

“Jesus Christ!” Brande said. “Meltdown.”

“Yes, we think so”

“In the Pacific.”

“That much we know for sure. We’re talking almost four miles down.”

“And you want our equipment?”

“Admiral Delecourt would like to borrow your equipment, yes.”

“No way,” Dokey said. “My ROVs don’t go anywhere without me.”

“I told Delecourt that’s the way it would be, but I had to make his pitch first.”

“And the next pitch?” Brande asked.

“Inside curve. Will you take it on?”

Brande thought about it for a moment. “There’s no timeline on the meltdown?”

“The nuke specialists haven’t made any guesses or promises yet. They’ll try to refine it, and we’re trying to get additional information from the Russians.”

“I can’t risk my people,” Brande said.

“I understand if you take that position,” Hampstead said. “In which event, would you allow the Navy to use your equipment?”

“We get a contract out of this?” Dokey asked.

“We can work something out, Okey. We always seem to.”

“What I’ll have to do,” Brande said, “is get a team together and see what they say.”

“It would have to be done quickly, Dane.”

Brande slid his chair up to the desk and picked up the phone. He dialed the San Diego number, but Thomas was out. He asked the graduate student who answered to have her tracked down, thinking this was the one time they needed pagers.

Thomas called back eight minutes later.

“Rae, I want you to start rounding up people.”

“What people? Why?”

“Can’t tell you why just yet. I want you, Kim, Bob Mayberry, Ingrid Roskens, Svetlana and Valeri. Where’s the Orion?*

“She’s over Harbor One. They just delivered two new turbines.”

“Call Mel and order her back to San Diego immediately, full turns. Call the suppliers and get everything we need to fully stock her.”

“Dane! What’s going on?”

“Tell you as soon as I get there.” Brande hung up. “Will the Navy fly us west, Avery?”

“You can take my Gulfstream, Dane. If you’re going to do this”

“No promises, just yet. But we’ll get the wheels in motion.”

“You bring a contract with you?” Dokey asked.

Hampstead grinned ruefully. “Slipped my mind.”

“We’ll bill you,” Dokey said.

“What’s going to happen when the word gets out?” Brande asked. “Assuming it will.”

“Oh, it will. It’s just a matter of time. I imagine there could be some panic exhibited.”

“You have a penchant for understating things, Avery,” Brande said.

Carl Unruh spent the morning and afternoon with a telephone pressed against his ear. His left ear was red and sore. He had missed lunch and his stomach rumbled from time to time. Other than the intrusion on his concentration, he figured the missed meal was good for his waistline.

Outside his window, it was beginning to snow, tiny brittle flakes crashing out of a gray overcast. It set the tone for his day.

Shortly after one o’clock, he got a call from the DDO, the Deputy Director of Operations.

“Carl, one of my people working at Sheremetevo Airport dropped a note on us,” Oren Patterson told him.

“Somebody in Moscow is going somewhere?”

“Right. You know who Colonel General Dmitri Ivanovich Oberstev is?”

“Director of the Red Star project”

“And Colonel Alexi Cherbykov?”

“The director’s aide”

“And Admiral Grigori Orlov?”

“C-in-C, Navy”

“You got ’em all. You’re getting good at this, Carl.”

“That makes me feel better, Oren”

“Anyway, there’s a couple more people our asset wasn’t sure of. Vladimir Yevgeni may have been one of them. They all crawled aboard a VIP Ilyushin transport and took off.”

“It’s the right composition for a group we’re very interested in,” Unruh said. “Did your asset get a destination for this bunch?”

“No, but the plane was not headed in the direction of Plesetsk. Going out on a limb, I’ll say they’re going to Vladivostok.”

“The heavy hitters are going to conduct the search, you think?”

“Either that, or the boss man is so pissed at them, he’s told them to get it back personally.”

“I’d go for that, Oren. Put Oberstev in flippers and have him drag it back. How about data on the package?”

“We’re still poking and prodding.”

Unruh wanted to tell him to prod his sources with some red-hot branding irons, but knew better than to suggest it. They could only move as fast as they could move without bringing attention to themselves.

In mid afternoon, at an instruction from his secretary over the intercom, he cut short one conversation and punched another button on his phone.

“Jack, if you’re not calling with good news, I don’t want to talk to you,” he told Evoy.

“I’m calling to say we’re showing seven major CIS battle-wagons en route to the scene. I think we can assume a few submarines, also. NSA eavesdropped on several messages they’re sure were aimed at subs because they were coded on ELF frequencies.”

“What’s the ETA on the warships?”

“The Kirov — she’s a rocket cruiser — is leading a task force of three and is about seventy-six hours away. There’s a task force with the Kynda that will hit there ten or twelve hours later. Again, they may have a sub closer.”

“Anything else?”

“There’s a deep submersible named the Sea Lion that’s been operating in the Barents Sea. As of two hours ago, when we had a KH-11 go over, the submersible has been recovered, and the research vessel is headed for Murmansk at seventeen knots. That’s top speed for that ship, Carl.”

“Interpretation?”

“I’d say that the submersible at Vladivostok is inoperative. They’re going to fly this hummer eastward. We’re watching to see if they fly a Candid into Murmansk.”

The Candid was the NATO code name for the Ilyushin II-76, a heavy military transport.

“Good, Jack. Let me know.”

Unruh hung up, but the intercom blared immediately. “Yes, Joanie?”

“Wilson Overton is on three.”

“You told him to call back sometime?”

“More or less, but he’s rather insistent.”

“Okay.” He pressed the three button. “How you doing, Will?”

“I’m okay. How about you, Mr. Director?”

“Holding the fort down. What can I do for you?”

“I need a confirmation. I’ve tried to reach a number of people today, but they’re either out of the office, out of town, or out of the country.”

“Sounds good to me,” Unruh said, meaning it.

He did not like the thought of confirming anything for anyone outside of the agency or the White House.

“My sources tell me that a CIS rocket went down in the Pacific Ocean. They tell me that a nuclear reactor is running wild.”

“That right?” Unruh asked, his mind racing for alternatives to, “no comment.”

“Uh-huh. The way I’ve got it, and the way the Post’s going to run it, this nuclear reactor is going to radiate the whole Pacific Ocean. Is that right, Mr. Director?”

“I don’t know how one tiny reactor is supposed to contaminate something as big as the Pacific.”

“It’s tiny?”

“It must be if it was on a rocket. Is that what you’re telling me, Will?”

“Are you confirming the facts, Mr. Director?”

“You know who you ought to talk to, Will? Robert Balcon. He might know something I don’t.”

“Balcon hasn’t been available all day.”

“Did you call the CIS Embassy?” Unruh asked. Hell, it was their rocket. Let them deal with the media.

“They’re the ones who are out of the country.”

“Damn? Is that right?”

“You’re the Director of Intelligence. Aren’t you supposed to know things like that?”

Unruh sighed. “Read me what you’ve got.”

He had learned early on to never volunteer anything, but also to never lie to the press. He listened closely to Overton’s story.

“Well, Mr. Director?”

“If I were you, Will, I’d double-check your facts on the size of the reactor.”

“But the rest is accurate.”

“A Soviet A2 went down a couple thousand miles west of Hawaii, though I hope you won’t publish those coordinates. It carried a component for their space station. That’s all I’ll say right now, Will.”

“I can live with that. Thanks, Mr. Unruh.”

Unruh hoped to hell that Overton could not find many more confirmations before press time.

Valeri Ivanovitch Dankelov spent the day at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, then drove his two-year-old Chevrolet Corsica back to his apartment in Pacific Beach.

It was a small apartment on the second floor, 800-square feet, with two bedrooms, a medium-size living room, and a slim view of the Pacific Ocean between two condominiums across the street. It was about twice the size of the apartment Dankelov had grown up in Leningrad.

Sometimes, he felt like a pebble rattling around in an oversized can, and he hated to admit, even to himself, that he liked it.

Even when Dankelov had left home for Leningrad State University, he had been pressed by people, forced to share accommodations in a boarding house with four roommates. If there was anything he thoroughly and quietly enjoyed about his time in the United States, it was the sense of elbow-room.

He also liked water. Leningrad State University, where he had begun studies in civil engineering, was sited on Vasilevsky Island in the Neva River delta. Peter the Great had imagined the area to be Russia’s version of Venice, but the canals he had begun were later filled in.

It was at the Leningrad State University where Dankelov’s penchant for things mechanical had been wed to a newly discovered love for the sea, especially the Baltic Sea which had always been there for him, and therefore had gone unnoticed. The Soviet Union, in a quest for new sources of energy, was reinforcing study in oceanography and robotics, and Dankelov’s academic abilities and interests did not go unremarked. He was selected for advanced study at Lomonosov University in Moscow. From those days, he most remembered intense intellectual conversations, long walks among the harried pedestrians on Vernadsky Prospekt, and the December 1980 commemoration of John Lennon’s death in the park across from the university.

Upon graduation from Lomonsov, he was one of five selected for further study at the Scripps Institute. It was an honor to be chosen, and Dankelov appreciated, not only the opportunity for academic and practical experience among some of the world’s best oceanographers, but also the chance to see a world beyond the limits of Leningrad and Moscow.

There was something of a diplomatic flap when Dankelov and Svetlana Polodka, one of his fellow postgraduate students, were approached by Dane Brande and offered both practical experience and jobs. After discussions between the United States Department of State and the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Dankelov and Polodka were allowed two-year extensions on their student visas. Some other accommodation was reached by someone, allowing them to accept salaries. Salaries, Svetlana had been quick to note, that amounted to life savings for most Soviet citizens.

Salaries, Dankelov had replied, which rapidly evaporated in the San Diego standard of living.

And six years later, they were on the fourth extension of their visas. The authorities in Moscow approved because Dankelov and Polodka provided scientific reports (a procedure which Dane Brande thoroughly endorsed) that were helpful to other Russian scientists and oceanographers. The U.S. Department of State approved the extensions because Dankelov had become something of an expert in acoustic controls as a result of the feedback he received from his Russian counterparts. The same could be said for Svetlana Polodka, who specialized in fiber-optics communication.

Still, even with the freedoms and the substantial income, Dankelov often longed to return to Leningrad. There is a national consciousness among Soviet citizens of a vaporous, but undeniable, linkage to the rodina, the motherland. He had already made up his mind that he would return upon the expiration of the current visa.

Svetlana did not feel the same way, and that basic difference between them had terminated a seven-month affair begun in the first year of their association with Marine Visions. Dankelov frequently found himself thinking in terms of a family of his own, and he was not about to start one in the United States.

If he did not hurry, he would not start one in Leningrad or Moscow, either. In his middle thirties, he did not have illusions about his attractiveness. He was short, and he was broad. His face matched his stature. He assumed others thought of him as brown. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Swarthy complexion. He was given to wearing brown suits and dull neckties. He had never fully acclimated to the casual atmosphere permeating the MVU labs and workshops.

Dankelov climbed the outside stairway to his balcony, crossed it, and unlocked the door. Inside, he placed his briefcase on his desk in the living room, then hung up his suit coat in the closet.

In the kitchenette, he took a frozen Swiss steak dinner from the freezer and placed it in the microwave. He had not forgotten the food shortages in his homeland, and he often felt guilty living among the abundance available to him here.

He went back to the living room, turned on the television for the evening network news, then rewound the tape on the answering machine.

The only message was from Kaylene Thomas. She wanted him to call her at the office immediately. He did not know what time she had called.

While he dialed the office number, he watched as Tom Brokaw solemnly summarized a copyrighted story of the Washington Post.

The telephone was still ringing on the other end when Dankelov replaced his receiver.

My God! What have you idiots done now?

Curtis Samuel Aaron was on the flying bridge of the Justica. He had kicked his running shoes off and propped his feet on the instrument panel. There was a chill breeze building, and Aaron could feel his skin puckering beneath his grayed white sweatshirt. There was a small rip in the knee of his pants, which had been designer jeans three or four years before.

Aaron stroked the beard he was so proud of — well tended and shaped like that of Kenny Rogers — and sipped from a lukewarm rum-and-Coke, the one drink he allowed himself daily. The cruiser’s ice machine had broken down, a victim of the neglect that had already affected one of the VHF radios and the sonar.

Aaron was fifty-two years old, and he felt good. He felt better about himself physically than he did about the rest of the world, which was deteriorating so rapidly that he sometimes feared he would outlast it.

The airborne crud of cities choked him. He would drown in the sludge coating the coastlines and clotting the rivers. Hiking the byways of America, he would trip over plastic sacks — and six-pack webs, falling to his death on the shrapnel of aluminum cans. His dreams, ever changing were full of such futures.

His disturbing and forbidding dreams prompted him to challenge those who disrupted nature, wherever he found them. It was necessary to clean up that which had already been dirtied, but it was imperative also to deter those who would further rape the planet.

Right then, his ire was directed at the two ships standing off the Justica by two hundred feet. George Dawson had stationed a crewman on the stern of the salvage vessel with a shotgun. The signal was clear to Aaron, and he had no intention of challenging a twelve-gauge. His battles had ever been verbal; there would not be a missile exchange of any kind between Oceans Free and those who interfered in the course of history and nature.

The submersible from the MVU research vessel had descended three times that day, and was currently still somewhere on the bottom. Rooting out that which nature and fate had planted, disturbing forces that would have long-term effects on the planet.

Aaron was certain of it.

And angered at his own impotency in preventing it.

Among the nine people of Oceans Free who were with him aboard the Justica, there were several who advocated storming the vessels.

The single shotgun, however, was deterrent enough. The most dangerous thing aboard the cruiser was a fishing hook.

Dawn Lengren, a can of Budweiser in one hand, was sitting in the helmsman’s seat, fiddling with the AM radio, trying to get some news. She had already found a broadcast out of Mexico, but no one aboard could speak Spanish.

A couple of the others finished cleaning the galley and joined them on the flying bridge. The several conversations taking place were acrimonious and mostly directed against the Grade. From below came the floating aroma of some kind of pie baking. Mimi Ahern was fond of baking and of desserts.

Dawn found a station.

“…independent experts contacted by this station say that the radiation could eventually encompass all of the Pacific Rim. Within hours of the news breaking, protests were being mounted in Japan, in Korea, in the Philippines, and in the Hawaiian Islands. Three persons were injured in Seattle when a so-called ‘Rally of Outrage’ in that city turned to violence.

“City and state governments along the West Coast have urged restraint and the patience to await more information.

“Fishing and shipping companies have tied up telephone lines to Washington in the attempt to learn more about the catastrophe. Fishermen from Alaska to Mexico were rumored to be planning meetings. The citizens of communities which could be affected by the ever-spreading contaminated water are panicky, and…”

Aaron was surprised to find that his feet were on the deck, and he was almost out of his chair, leaning forward, straining to hear the raspy voice on the speaker.

“Dawn, start the engines,” he ordered.

“What! Where are we going?”

“I don’t know yet, but we’ve got to hurry.”

Chapter Six

Kaylene Thomas met the Orion as she returned to her home port of San Diego. Brande and Dokey had landed hours before, but Brande had only called her from the airport to report that fact, then said that he and Dokey were headed for the San Diego campus of the University of California.

She stood in the open warehouse bay of Marine Visions’ dockside storage facility, wishing she were 600 feet down in the dome of Harbor One, part of which was her own creation. She should be there as the new turbines, which produced electricity from spinning their blades in the undersea currents, were moved into position on their steel mounts and brought on-line.

One of the nine original turbines had broken down irrevocably after two years of use, and fourteen new turbine-generators were scheduled to replace the originals. The new models, designed and fabricated by Dokey, Otsuka, Roskens and Mayberry, were constructed of stainless steel and carbon-fiber plastic and should last a great deal longer than the originals.

That was where she should be, Harbor One, doing the job she was hired to do. Instead, she was delivering food.

Food for which a magnificent bill would arrive within thirty days.

Around her, the MVU staffers she had cajoled into working late lounged on top of crates or on the dusty cement floor. There were seven of them, all males, and they looked slightly beat after unloading the trucks. Doug Vahrencamp, newly hired to work on the mining project, grinned at her. He was in his mid thirties and handsome in a red-haired way, like Van Johnson. He was unmarried and interested in her. She had turned down two of his dinner invitations because, to her way of thinking, anyone who worked for Marine Visions did not have much in the way of a future.

She picked up her cellular phone from the crate beside her and dialed a familiar number and ordered five pizzas and two cases of beer. MVU people thrived on late hours and beer and pizza.

Switching the phone for a walkie-talkie, she depressed the transmit button. “Orion, this is Mike Victory.”

“Go ahead, Mike.”

“Did you top off tanks, Mel?”

“Right up to the caps, Kaylene. You have any idea what’s up yet?”

“We’ve got a gang here to load you as soon as you’re alongside, Mel. Full replenishment of pantries and refrigerators.”

“That’s three months’ worth,” Mel Sorenson, captain of the Orion, told her.

“We just do what we’re told. Plus, we’re stocking up your replacement parts and batteries. We’ll load SARSCAN, too. Did you run systems checks?”

“Sure did, on the way in. Everything’s in apple pie order, darlin’.”

“Engines?”

“Super good. We’re ten thousand hours away from overhaul. Kaylene, you haven’t answered my question.”

“You did hear the news?”

“I heard,” Sorenson said. “That’s it?”

“I don’t know. You read between your lines, and I’ll read between mine.”

“You sure, darlin’? If that’s it, I don’t like it a damn bit.” Thomas did not like it, either, and she was not yet certain how she would react when Brande broke the news. No, that was wrong. She knew exactly what her response would be, and it disheartened her as much as it relieved her.

Thomas sighed as the research vessel eased into the pier, her cycloidal propellers deployed and stabilizing her. The twin-hulled ship was particularly beautiful to Thomas, who fell in love with practically any marine craft.

She was going to miss it.

Cmdr. Alfred Taylor sat in the wardroom with his executive officer, Neil Garrison. They were both attacking pork chops and slippery green peas, washing them down with tall glasses of milk.

They had eaten silently for ten minutes, each of them digesting the contents of the message broadcast to the Los Angeles from the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet.

“What’s your best estimate, Neil?”

“I had Jorgenson run it, and I haven’t double-checked his numbers, but it looks like another thirty-five hours. Something over eleven hundred nautical miles. We’re tapped out at thirty-three knots, Skipper.”

“And what do we do when we get there?” Taylor asked.

“Find the damned thing, I guess. That’s what CINCPAC wants us to do.”

“Deep, deep,” Taylor said.

“I know. I don’t give us much of a chance, but I told Chief Carter to make sure his sonar equipment was in first-class shape.”

“Knowing Carter, it will be.”

“We could get lucky, maybe. Say it didn’t drop into some ravine that shadows the sonar signal.”

“I won’t count on it,” Taylor told him.

“Me, either.” Garrison chewed silently for a full minute. “What about the crew?”

“I’ve been thinking about it, Neil. I think we should tell them.”

“It’s the right thing to do,” Garrison agreed. “It’s not like we had a choice, of course, but I’d want to know the water could be irradiated.”

“Maybe it won’t be,” Taylor suggested. He knew he was grasping at straws.

“That’s something else I don’t think we can count on.”

“How come we run all over the Pacific inside the same can with a D2G reactor and we have to worry about some puny thing the Russians lost?”

“Iʼm a naval engineer, not a philosopher, Skipper.”

“You suppose the guy who lost this thing is a philosopher, Neil?”

Avery Hampstead remembered he had promised Adrienne that he would attend a wrestling match she had arranged in New York City. Pulling a pad of Post-it-Notes close, he jotted himself a reminder to call her and cancel.

He hated to do it. He also hated wrestling matches, but he thoroughly enjoyed watching Adrienne making money the old-fashioned way. Conning people out of it, as it were. There were not many Hampsteads with her elan and guts.

It was still light on the other side of the porthole window, but all he could see were the tops of fluffy white clouds. Behind them, night would be creeping up.

Hampstead had been about to see Brande and Dokey off from Belle Chasse in his chartered Gulfstream when he thought about what he would be doing back in Washington. He would be sitting in his office, talking to a select group of people on the phone for the next couple of weeks.

And he had quickly decided that he could talk on the phone from anywhere.

From here, for instance.

He picked up the telephone receiver from the table in front of him and asked the radio operator to connect him with Langley on a secure transmission.

“Will do, sir. Do you need some coffee back there?”

“Any time you have a chance, that would be great,” Hampstead told him.

He felt guilty, all by himself in the main cabin of the C-20B VIP transport. It was operated by the Air Force’s 89th Military Airlift Wing, and it had a crew of three and thirteen empty passenger seats. He wondered which reporter would get hold of the voucher and crucify him in the press.

The phone buzzed softly and he picked it up.

“Your call, sir.”

“Thank you. Carl, are you there?”

“I’m here,” Unruh said. The scrambler made his voice a little tinny.

“I wasn’t sure I’d catch you in.”

“My couch is soft. I know it well. Where in the hell are you, Avery?”

“I’m not sure. But I’d bet most of the way to Hawaii, I think.”

Unruh did not seem surprised that Hampstead would head for the scene of the crime. “Did you talk to Brande?”

“I talked.”

“And?”

“And he’s going to pitch it to his people.”

“Pitch it! He’s going to pitch it!”

“What would you have him do, Carl? They’re civilians. They’re not like you.”

“Shit. When do we get an answer?”

“I don’t know, but you’ll be the second one to know what it is.”

“What if he won’t go?”

“Then, I think Admiral Delecourt will get to use the submersible.”

“Does he know how to use it?”

“I doubt it.”

“You’re probably right, Avery. Okay, look, the Russians are on the way.” Unruh gave him a rundown on the ships steaming toward the site of the crash.

“I don’t believe any of those that you’ve listed are capable, Carl.”

“It’s mainly a show of force in the area, I suppose. We think they’re moving the Sea Lion in from the Barents Sea. We’ll know more on that in a few hours.”

Avery Hampstead rummaged through his mental file drawers, found the submersible, studied it, and said, “The Sea Lion is designed for seventeen thousand feet. They’re going to be late, and they’re going to be short of capability when they get there, Carl.”

“Maybe they’re optimistic? Hell, at least they’re on the move.”

The communications specialist came back and placed a mug of steaming coffee on the table. Hampstead nodded his thanks and loosened his tie.

“There’s another angle, Carl. They may be operating an acoustically controlled ROV from the submersible. That’s a possible approach.”

“Then they can do it?”

“They can find it, maybe. But I don’t know of any of their non-tethered robots that are big enough to do the job if the wreckage is in a tight place.”

“And we’re back to Brande.”

“Yes.”

“And he’s iffy?”

“Brande’s not, but his coterie of experts may be. You can’t blame them, Carl.”

“Yeah. Well, hell, it may all be academic, Avery.”

“In what way?”

“The nuke people from NRC, DIA, and the New Mexico study group have produced a very short report that says, one, meltdown is a certainty, and two, it could occur at practically any time.”

“Jesus. They don’t have a best estimate?”

“They do, but it looks slippery to me, Avery. No one wants to call it a guess, but they don’t want to have their names attached to a bad guess, either. What it says here, that given their projections of the design evolution from the Topaz Two, and given that there was a malfunction in the automatic controls on impact — they think that’s a certainty — the reactor will reach a critical point anywhere from 0100 hours September ten to 0100 hours September eighteen. That’s local time in the impact zone.”

“Oh, damn. Nine days from now.”

“A little over. That’s what they say. And it’s a hell of a broad range, Avery. I don’t know whether to believe them or not.”

“Does the President believe them?”

“Does he have a choice?” Unruh asked.

“All right. I’ll call Brande.”

“Don’t,” Unruh said.

“But I’ve got to.”

“Let’s not influence his decision with unreliable facts,” Unruh said.

Wilson Overton had not fully appreciated the potential reaction to his story until the wire and TV reports began to filter back from the West Coast.

He had spent most of his time, after the special edition hit the street, drinking endless cups of coffee in the city room with his editor, Ned Nelson.

Nelson mentioned a Pulitzer more than once, but Overton did not want to think about it or talk about it, as if either thought or speech might jeopardize his chances.

He was more concerned about what happened next. He had the political beat in the city, but this had gone international. He fretted and ripped increasing numbers of stories from the printer and forced a lighthearted banter with Nelson.

He had tried to run down a guy named Hampstead who worked with oceanographic research at the Department of Commerce, but had been told he was out of town.

Everyone was quickly getting out of town.

At nine-thirty, the AP correspondent out of Seattle reported that ten people were then hospitalized as a result of the mini-riot that had taken place in front of the seamen’s union hall.

Two thousand fishermen in the San Francisco Bay area had surrounded the CIS Consulate. They were making demands, but both demands and responses were somewhat incoherent.

At eight in the morning in Tokyo, the students were beginning to fill the streets. Extra police had been called to duty. Same thing in Seoul. It was going to screw up their balance of riots, Overton thought. The Korean students usually rampaged in the early summer.

The central thread running through all of the reports, Overton thought, was that people were angry and scared, but they did not know where to direct their anger or how to ease their fears.

Get it up! Get it up!

From where? How deep was it? No one seemed to know. Overton did not know.

He wondered if he had overstated his case. The television networks had quoted him, almost word for word.

He was on the verge of self-recrimination when the phone on Nelson’s desk rang. The editor picked it up, listened, spoke, hung up.

“That was the international desk, Will. It’s your story, you run with it.”

“Whoosh,” Overton let his breath go. “I suspect Defense will get involved. Maybe I’ll go out there.”

“No. You go out to Dulles and catch the first flight you can for Honolulu. While you’re on the way, I’ll arrange a charter boat. Call me the minute you’re on the ground in Honolulu, and I’ll tell you what I’ve lined up.”

When the pilot whispered over the intercom that they were passing over Indianapolis, Overton looked out his window and saw the faraway lights, all checkerboarded. Good old middle America.

He wished he were in it, solidly placed and confident.

Instead of heading into the unknown.

The unknown was the fear.

He pulled his notebook from his jacket pocket and jotted a few notes on that theme.

The skies were overcast, a flattened dome of dull concrete gray that stretched infinitely toward every horizon. The air was chilled, not yet absolutely cold, but threatening. There was probably snow in the forecast, Oberstev thought.

He cracked his window open and sniffed the air. It was tangy with salt.

The car moved through the streets quickly, following the other polished black Zil. Around him, the city, the primary city of the Primorsky Territory, had a frontier flavor. There were newer apartment blocks, but they were interspersed with rows of wooden-framed houses. The people on the streets, most of them dressed roughly, ignored the official motorcade as it sped past them. Oberstev envied them their aloofness.

Janos Sodur tried to strike up a conversation, but he was inept at small talk.

“Have you been to Vladivostok before, Colonel?” Oberstev asked.

“No, never.”

“Then you should take advantage of the opportunity to see it now.”

Sodur, sitting in a jump seat, took the hint and craned his neck to watch the small shops passing by. Free enterprise reigned in some of them.

Oberstev looked across the wide seat toward his aide, Alexi Cherbykov. Cherbykov shook his head minutely. He, too, was agitated that Sodur had finagled his way into this trip.

The three of them were in the back of the second Zil. The first Zil contained Aerospace Subcommittee Chairman Yevgeni and Admired Orlov as well as the commander of the Vladivostok naval base, the largest of the CIS Pacific Fleet, who had met them at the airfield.

The base commander knew where his priorities were best placed.

Oberstev did not mind his relegation to the second car. The eight-hour flight from Moscow had covered 6,000 kilometers and six time zones, and he was fatigued. He had slept, but fitfully and erratically and more as a matter of combatting exhaustion than as a normal part of a biological cycle.

Soon, they turned onto a coastal highway and the gray Sea of Japan was visible. The whaling and fishing fleets were out, and the harbor looked almost barren. A few dozen freighters and tankers lay at anchor or were drawn up to the docks. There were perhaps twenty good-size warships near the naval base’s facilities.

Oberstev watched the activity on the docks as they drove past. The workers moved desultorily, filling nets with cargo, off-loading small cars, wrestling with reluctant equipment. They seemed not to care about anything.

Once on the grounds of the base, the commander’s car led them directly to a gray brick building with a white sign that identified it as the operations center.

The drivers of both cars braked to a stop, then hopped out to open the rear doors.

The passengers emerged, then merged as a group of six as they entered the building.

The base commander explained, “I have set aside the officers’ mess as a command center, Admiral Orlov, if that will be sufficient?”

“That will be fine, Admiral,” Orlov told him. “With any luck at all, we will not be here long.”

They went down a long, wide hallway and were briefed on accommodations for bed and board. Quarters in the guest officers’ barracks were being prepared, and their luggage would be delivered there. Food would be sent in, anytime it was requested.

In the officers’ mess, they shed their greatcoats. Navy seamen jumped forward to collect them.

The mess had been fitted with a table surrounded by padded chairs and topped with a dozen telephones in addition to notepads, pens, pitchers of water, and glasses. Tea was brewing in an urn at one side of the room. Navy technicians stood at attention before six electronic consoles until Orlov told them to return to their duties. A large map had been tacked to the far wall.

Oberstev settled into a chair. His eyes felt bleary. Removing his glasses, he methodically polished the lenses. He wondered if his slender shoulders could take the burden that he felt was coming.

Yevgeni sat at the head of the table, his sycophant Sodur close by. Orlov spoke to a captain named Kokoshin who, in turn, barked a few orders, and technicians began to fly. In minutes, variously colored symbols appeared on the map, identifying the positions of ships and submarines. The area of the sunken A2e was designated by a circular set of dashes drawn in red grease pencil.

Captain Kokoshin came forward to brief them on the symbols. He rattled off coordinates and ship types and estimated times of arrival in the area of operations, now called the AO.

“Questions, comrades?” Orlov asked.

“Deep submersibles?” Yevgeni asked.

“The submersible based here is fully disassembled, retrofitting, as is its support ship. According to CIS Navy Headquarters, the Sea Lion, currently in the Barents Sea, has been identified as the alternate choice and is en route to Murmansk.”

“Tell me about the timelines and the preparations, Captain,” Orlov said.

“Admiral Orlov, the information given me is that the Sea Lion will be in Vladivostok within twenty-four hours. It will need, of course, a support vessel, and the patrol ship Timofey Ol’yantsev is now being fitted with lifting booms and other necessary equipment. It should be ready as soon as the submersible arrives.”

“And then?”

“And then, Admiral,” Kokoshin said, “it will require seventy-five hours to put the Olʼyantsev into the area of operations.”

Oberstev appreciated a briefer who had his facts right at hand. Admiral Orlov may have also appreciated Kokoshin, but he scowled. “It will be four days before we have the submersible in place.”

“I am afraid so, Admiral. However, it may take that long for the submarines to locate the wreckage.”

Oberstev thought that response highly optimistic. He assumed that the nuclear experts had not reported in, for there was no mention of the state of the reactor, or when that state might irrevocably change.

His scowl deepening, the commander in chief of the navy asked, “Other questions?”

Oberstev would really have preferred taking a short nap, but he pointed at the map and asked, “Captain, you have identified only CIS shipping?”

“That is true, General”

“What of American ships in the area?”

“They are there, of course, General. We have not concerned ourselves with them for this operation. An overflight by a Tupolev Tu-20 reconnaissance aircraft revealed that U.S. naval units from Midway Island are en route. Additionally, there have been surveillance flights out of Midway Island. In the area itself are several civilian boats.”

“They are there on purpose? The civilian ships?”

“We assume so, General. American television and radio broadcasts identified the coordinates, though not exactly. Again, we do not think that the civilian ships will be of concern.”

“I recommend that you do concern yourself, Captain,” Oberstev said. “I don’t think the Americans will rest until this passes over. They tend to think of themselves as superior beings when it comes to salvage.”

Kokoshin looked to Orlov.

The commander nodded. “Locate them.”

Oberstev looked at the red-dotted circle on the map, thinking about what was within it somewhere.

And he feared that one day he might be remembered, not for constructing the world’s best and most effective space station, but for putting something very lethal inside a red-dotted circle.

On the atlases in children’s schoolbooks.

Two hours earlier, in response to a coded ELF signal, the Winter Storm had surfaced briefly to receive two burst messages. They were coded for Gurevenich’s eyes only, and he had taken them to his cabin, retrieved the code book from his safe, and spent twenty minutes decoding the first.

He uncovered several terse statements. 1) A CIS Rocket Forces A2e had gone down in the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of 26°20′ North, 176°10′ East, 2) the payload was exceptionally important, 3) the Winter Storm was to rendezvous with an Atomnaya Protivolodochnaya Podlodka boat — a hunter/ killer submarine of the class called Alfa by NATO — named Tashkent, and 4) the two of them were to locate the sunken rocket and its payload. Additionally, the Kirov and the Kynda, with their two task forces, were en route to the site.

The frantic tone of urgency, urgency, urgency permeated the message.

Mikhail Gurevenich did not understand the urgency. Rockets failed occasionally, though most often over a land mass and were destroyed in the air. If they did go down at sea, the navy’s deep-diving submersibles frequently recovered parts of them. He wondered if the Kirov was escorting a salvage vessel with a submersible. It was possible.

The underlying impetuosity might be a reaction to a pay-load that defied space treaties, or that contained supersecret components.

That, he could understand.

The Winter Storm, normally an antisubmarine warfare (ASW) vessel, was designed to hunt down and sink hostile submarines, and Gurevenich assumed from his orders to search for this downed rocket that the payload was, indeed, highly classified.

The captain decoded the next message. It was short, directed to the captain personally, and was not, repeat not, to be disseminated among the crew.

Gurevenich’s heart throbbed, his arteries suddenly clogged with foreign objects.

Nuclear reactor in meltdown.

Or just a possible meltdown.

It was a mild fear, never realized, with which nuclear submarine captains always lived.

And he was ordered into the furnace.

To what end?

Gurevenich doubted that his deep-tow sonars would find the debris. The waters were over 5,000 meters deep. The Winter Storm was stretching her capability at 700 meters of depth.

He dropped the second message into the shredder, stood up, and slipped out of his cabin into the narrow passageway. Making his way forward, he reached the control center and signaled Sr. Lt. Mostovets.

The lieutenant crossed the center and met him at the plotting table.

Gurevenich pointed out the X marked on the charted line of their projected course. “Is that the latest position, Lieutenant?”

“It is, Captain. About five minutes ago.”

Gurevenich calculated quickly. They had covered almost 536 nautical miles in fourteen hours. “Speed?” he asked.

“We have managed thirty-eight knots, Captain.”

“And the target area?”

“Nine hundred and fourteen nautical miles, Captain. If we maintain speed, we can achieve it in about twenty-four hours.”

The Winter Storm could make forty-three knots, but Gurevenich did not like to sustain that speed, despite the forced march requirement that he read into the message.

“We will maintain thirty-eight, Ivan Yosipovich. Notify the sonar operators that we may be hearing the Tashkent and the Kirov sometime within the next fourteen or fifteen hours. The Kirov will have three escorts. Later, the Kynda and her escorts will close on the area.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“And then stand down half of most watches. We will want everyone rested by the time we reach the target area.”

He saw the question marks in Mostovets’s eyes, but elected to not further enlighten the lieutenant.

“So, Hobin Rood and Tire Fruck,” had been the greeting from Miriam Baker, Brandeʼs favorite librarian at UCSD’s library, when the two of them approached the counter at four o’clock.

“Hi, Miriam,” Brande said.

Dokey leaned on the high counter and smiled at her.

“No,” she said.

“Damn,” Dokey said.

“Miriam,” Brande said, “the two of us want to become experts on nuclear power. Say, in about two hours.”

It took her all of fifteen seconds to think it over. “You,” she said to Brande, “go see Dr. Harold Provost. And you,” to Dokey, “come with me.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Dokey said.

Brande went across campus and had to wait twenty minutes before Provost was free. He spent an hour-and-a-half with the professor, and by the time he got back to the library, Dokey was stocked up with a thick sheaf of photocopies and fifteen books. Brande shared the load and they carried the books out to Brande’s Pontiac.

It was a 1957 Pontiac Bonneville convertible, somewhat on the rare side, finished in white with powder blue trim and a matching blue interior. Like its sisters on the short production run, it was fuel injected, and it spent about as much time in the shop, having the fuel injection fine-tuned, as it did on the road. Brande still liked it better than any other car he had owned.

Dokey was less nostalgic. He preferred cars that took advantage of the technology currently available. On the subject of Brandeʼs car, they had reached an accommodation. Dokey would not bad-mouth it, and Brande would not fire him.

They climbed in and slammed the heavy doors. Brande turned the ignition key, the V-8 engine fired, and purred. He felt a bit self-complacent about that.

“Let’s put the top down,” Dokey said.

“Let’s not.”

“Ah, come on.”

“I’m looking for a replacement hydraulic cylinder”

“It won’t go down?”

Brande pulled out onto Miramar Road without answering.

Dokey finally let it go by.

Brande drove slowly south through the campus, then turned east onto La Jolla Village Drive. Two blocks later, he slipped through the cloverleaf onto the San Diego Freeway south and slapped the accelerator down. The heavy car responded like a jackrabbit and soon he was holding the speedometer at seventy-five. Before their accommodation about automotive criticism had been reached, Dokey had likened the acceleration to that of an obese jackrabbit.

Mission Bay, with its complex of islands and parks, went by on the right. They sailed past the International Airport, curved through downtown San Diego, recurved past Balboa Park, skipped the turnoff onto the Coronado Bay Bridge, and exited the freeway on 28th Street.

The Pontiac had been issued a decal for the front bumper which gave it something of an exalted visitor status on the U.S. Naval Station. Brande drove straight to the headquarters building and found a parking space.

“We’re late,” Dokey noted.

“We’re normally late,” Brande said. “They’ve come to expect it.”

Avery Hampstead had arranged the briefing for them, and Brande and Dokey sat through a three-hour encapsulation of nuclear reactors presented to them by four different naval experts.

Afterward, starved, they had spent another forty-five minutes in a steak house, working on T-bones and rehashing what they had learned. By then, the news had broken on TV, and the few diners around them had a topic of conversation.

“I’m a little overwhelmed,” Brande admitted. “This isn’t a field I’ve ever had the slightest interest in.”

“It’s okay, Chief. I’ve got it down pat.”

“Do you really?”

“No. But give me a few days with all those books Miriam picked out for me.”

Brande had finally parked the Pontiac in the lot next to the office around eleven. They carried their supply of books upstairs and found the office populated by a dour group of MVU employees. A TV was going in one corner, with most of the crew of the Orion gathered around it.

Bob Mayberry was stretched out on two desktops, sound asleep, and he snored. No one paid any attention to him.

Svetlana Polodka and Valeri Dankelov were head-to-head at one side of the room, engaged in an intense discussion that required lots of hand gestures.

Kim Otsuka and Mel Sorenson were debating something with Ingrid Roskens and Larry Emry.

Rae Thomas was sitting at her desk, playing with her computer terminal. Her hands moved over the keyboard with some degree of force and anger, Brande thought.

They all looked up when Dokey shoved the door open. Brande dropped his load of books on the nearest desk.

Thomas rose from her chair and said, “Where have you two been?”

“Research, Rae. Important stuff. Everybody gather around, will you?”

Sorenson woke up Mayberry, and everyone moved to the center of the room, sitting on chairs and desks. All of the overhead fluorescents were on, and in the harsh glare, Brande realized they were all on the edge of fatigue. Their eyes were droopy. Their faces demonstrated their concern.

He had known most of them for many years, and they were as much his family as the line of his variously named ancestors back in Minnesota and Sweden. He leaned against a desk and looked at them with affection.

Bob Mayberry, long and lanky, and skinnier than should have been possible, had both hands cupped in front of his mouth, stifling yawns. His shock of corn-colored hair was in disarray. Mayberry was Director of Electronic Technology, and he had a special interest in sonar.

Lawrence Emry, with a PhD in geophysics, was the Director of Exploration. He was short at five-five, bald as the national bird, sported a bushy gray mustache, and was the oldest employee of Marine Visions. He was sixty-two and a widower for the past three years.

All of the heads of Marine Visions’s teams were gathered around him. The best in the business, people Brande could depend upon.

Rae Thomas appeared a little unfocused, as if her day had frazzled her nerves somewhat. She was wearing a short white dress that was strained in the right places, but which was slightly wrinkled. Her light-blond hair was fluffed by her fingers rather than a brush. Her blue eyes were vivid, firing off a few sparks, and her mouth was one short grim line. Worrying about money again, Brande thought.

“All right,” he said, pointing at the live, but muted, television set, “you’ve all heard the news. I’ll tell you about my day.”

He quickly went through the meeting with Hampstead and the briefings he and Dokey had received from Dr. Provost and from the Navy. He did not hold anything back.

“You have a contract from Commerce or the Navy?” Thomas asked.

“No, not yet. I wanted to go over it with all of you, first. I won’t make a commitment if we don’t have consensus here.”

“Because it’s dangerous?” Emry asked.

“There is risk, yes. A high risk.”

“How high is high, Dane?” Ingrid Roskens asked.

She was Chief Structural Engineer, responsible for the basic designs of the domes at Harbor One, the mining and agricultural complexes, and at Ocean Deep. She was in her forties, auburn-haired with traces of gray, and green-eyed, a proud product of Louisville, Kentucky. Her husband ran a student-counseling center at San Diego State University. She was the only MVU associate who did not know how to swim, and she did not want to learn.

“The feds are trying to pin it down, Ingrid. Provost and the Navy people say that, if it does let go while weʼre…while someone is in the immediate vicinity, say a couple thousand meters, the radiation dosage would very likely be fatal. Three-to six-month life span.”

“What’s the likelihood of the Russians retrieving it, Dane?” asked Mayberry.

“Much less than fifty percent, the last I heard, Bob. My understanding is that the closest submersible is undergoing retrofit and not available.”

“They’re flying the Sea Lion in from Murmansk,” Thomas said.

Brande looked at her. She had talked to someone, probably Hampstead.

“The Sea Lion can’t do it,” Emry said, “not if the reports on location are correct.”

“Twenty-six degrees, twenty minutes north, one-seventy-six degrees, ten minutes east,” Dokey told him.

Emry got up and walked across the office to a topographical map of the Pacific pinned to the wall between two windows. He searched briefly.

“Nope,” he said. “Well, if they got lucky and it came to rest on a mountaintop, maybe. We’ve got a mean depth of fifty-two hundred meters. My bookie will tell me the odds are in favor of it hitting in some valley or canyon. Locating it may be a tougher job than raising it.”

“It means,” Dokey said, “that we’ve got to use DepthFinder and SARSCAN.”

“Oh, I think so,” Emry agreed. “I’m in, Dane. I can always use a challenge before breakfast.”

“Ingrid?” Brande asked.

“You’re going to need a structural engineer?”

“Probably. It’ll depend upon the condition of the reactor body and the module.”

“I’ve always wanted to glow in the dark. In the light, too.”

“Thanks. Mel?”

The captain of the Orion mused to himself for a while, then said, “So it goes busto while we’re on the surface. We’d still have some time to get out of the area.”

“I think so, but I certainly can’t guarantee it,” Brande said.

“I’m going to get my kids over in the corner and talk it over,” Sorenson said.

The crew members of the research vessel, ranging from old salts who had circumnavigated the globe a dozen times to a teenager who had run out of money for surfing, followed Sorenson to one corner of the office.

Brande looked to Otsuka. “Kim?”

She did not display the smile and laughing eyes to which he had grown accustomed. Her mouth was downcast.

“I should tell you, Dane, that I received a telephone call from the Japanese Consulate.”

“Oh?”

“Hokkaido Marine Industries has a prototype submersible which they say is capable of depths to twenty-two thousand feet. It has not been fully tested, but the Tokyo government has asked them to make an attempt to locate the reactor. In response, Hokkaido Marine has asked the government to intervene and request that I return to Japan to assist them.”

Brande was disappointed. “You agreed, of course?”

“I have yet to make up my mind.”

“All right, Kim. You do whatever you need to do.”

The reclusive Dankelov raised his hand.

“Valeri?”

“Svetlana and I have a similar dilemma, Dane. We have been discussing the matter.”

“I can understand,” Brande said, though he did not want to do so. He considered both Dankelov and Polodka as world-class engineers. He did not want to lose them.

“The…accident,” Dankelov said, “is properly the responsibility of the CIS government, our government. We really should join our ships on the scene and offer our services.” Polodka nodded her approval of his statement.

“I respect that position, Valeri. I would point out, however, that the DepthFinder has the best chance of making the recovery within the probable time span whatever that may be.”

“September tenth,” Thomas said.

“What?” Dokey said.

“While you two were out researching, or whatever, Avery called. I don’t think he was going to tell us, but I got it out of him.”

“Tell us what?” Brande asked.

“The nuclear experts are saying meltdown will occur between September tenth and September eighteenth.”

“Shit,” Dokey said.

“Mel!” Brande called toward the corner of the office.

“I heard, Dane. I’m calculating now.”

Silence ruled while Sorenson tapped on his pocket calculator.

Finally, he said, “I can push Orion at top revolutions all the way, and maybe get twenty-eight knots out of her. Given favorable winds and currents, we’ll be in the area on the night of the sixth, or early morning on the seventh. Better call it the seventh”

“And have only three days of search time,” Emry said. “I don’t know that we can swing that, Dane.”

“It could be more than three days, Larry.”

“You want to bet on it?”

“No.”

More silence.

“Did Avery say anything else, Rae?”

“No. He was rushing for a meeting and I couldn’t pin him down on a contract or a fee,” she said.

She did not say, “in which case, we go belly-up,” but it was in her tone.

But Brande’s team was falling apart, anyway. With Otsuka, Dankelov and Polodka out, he was losing the expertise he might need on-site.

“Bob?”

“I’m thinking about Rachel and the kids, Dane,” Mayberry said. “Let me think for a few more minutes.”

“We can beat the goddamned deadline,” Dokey said with conviction.

He did not have to worry about a wife and family.

Brande turned to face Thomas. He had saved her for last. She was always supportive, even when she did question his strategies.

“How about you, Rae? What do you think?”

“Don’t ask me, Dane. I’m resigning, anyway.”