Ultra Deep

Chapter Seven

Brande looked so crestfallen, she could not believe it. He had to be acting. Most of the time, he was so damned hard to read.

She had not really planned to announce her resignation in a group setting. It just slipped out.

The room was pretty silent, the darkness of early morning intruding through the windows. She could hear a faulty fluorescent fixture buzzing. The Orion crew in the corner had turned around to stare at her. She felt as if she were on display, and she was conscious of the perspiration under her arms and the wrinkles in her dress.

When she was in junior high school, she used to dream about wearing gowns and low-cut, steamy black cocktail dresses, dancing the night away with tall, handsome men and being the carefree center of attention. Those dreams had evaporated over time, and she did not normally worry about how she appeared in front of a crowd. She was not particularly concerned about being anyone’s center of attention.

Why now?

She spoke to the silence. “I’ve been offered a position at Scripps.”

After she had made a few calls.

No one said anything.

“It’s difficult to turn down,” she added.

More silence.

Finally, Brande said, “Could we talk about this, Rae?”

No immediate acquiescence, as he had shown with Kim, Svetlana and Valeri.

“There’s not much to talk about.”

Dokey shook his head sadly.

Larry Emry said, “Who’s going to cover my checks?”

Kim Otsuka said, “You keep this place together, Kaylene. How could you think of leaving?”

Watching Brande’s face, Thomas thought he was as surprised by Kim’s statement as Thomas was. She had not thought that others really, really noticed what she did. They tended to be wrapped up in their own work.

Brande pushed off the desk he was leaning on and crossed over to her. He gripped her elbow lightly and turned her toward the restrooms.

“Let’s go over to my private office for a few minutes,” he said.

She could not remember a time before when he had touched her.

Almost without volition, she found herself headed toward the restrooms, dodging the varicolored desks and chairs, imperceptibly guided by Brande. The recalcitrant air conditioner vibrated loudly.

He aimed her toward the men’s room.

“I’m not going in there,” she said.

He altered course toward the ladies, pushed open the door, and nudged her through the doorway.

She shook her elbow free of his grasp, irritated that she had let him take control. The fluorescent lights seemed brighter than normal.

The lights made Brande’s eyes seem more alive, but she had seen them like that before. It was the signal that his interest was growing into near-fanaticism. He could become overly zealous of a pet project, she had learned.

His hair was tousled. He needed a haircut.

“How come,” she asked, “you always march through the front door with a wild idea and expect that everyone here will jump at the chance to share your enthusiasm?”

“I’m idealistic?” he asked, leaning back against the lavatory.

“Very.”

“Single-track mind?”

“Extremely very”

Brande sighed audibly. “I know I get carried away sometimes, Rae. Let the details slide. I didn’t, however, commit anyone.”

“You’d let Kim, Valeri and Svetlana go?”

“They’re not mine to control.”

“And I am?”

“What are you going to do at Scripps?”

“What I want to do,” she said.

“If that ocean out there gets hot, no one is going to be diving in it,” he countered.

“Maybe,” she conceded.

“We’ve got to do something. We’re the ones trained and equipped to do it.”

“You’ve got to do something,” she said. “I can agree with that. It doesn’t have to include me.”

“You want to be executive vice president?”

“That’s just a title. You pass them around like candy, remember?”

“Chief executive officer?”

“That’s just another title. Conferring it wouldn’t change anything.”

“With all of the power to organize, or reorganize, the company?”

She wavered, but said, “No.”

“Hire and fire?”

“No.” That part was a little scary.

Brande crossed his arms, his strong jaw lowered, and he stared at the floor. It was tiled in horrible, tiny octagonal ceramic pieces. Gold and blue.

“Damn it, Rae. I don’t want you to leave.”

“Why?”

He looked up at her. “Because I need you.”

She stared back and let her eyes show her disbelief. “For this particular task?”

“For everything.”

“Oh, damn it, Dane! Don’t do this to me.”

“I mean it, Rae.”

She studied his face, the lean, hard planes of it. Sometimes his expression could mean he was deadly serious, and sometimes the same expression hid his amusement; it was so difficult to tell. His eyes had darkened a bit, become pools into which she felt drawn. He smiled a trifle, a little boy’s smile.

She felt a little giddy, then finally said, “Come on, let’s get this safari into the jungle.”

He grinned. “You’re staying?”

“Only because you finally said you needed me.”

He pushed off the sink. “I’m glad.”

“And because I’m the new CEO.”

Brande and Mel Sorenson toured the Orion together, inspecting her diesel engines, her steering, and her cycloidal propellers which were then retracted inside the hull. The dry and refrigerated lockers were jammed with enough food to last the three months of an extended expedition. The fuel bunkers were topped off.

The bills for both would be due in thirty days, Thomas had told him.

Connie Alvarez-Sorenson, the research vessel’s first mate, as well as Sorenson’s first mate, had gone out and rented thirty videotapes. Just in case it got boring, she had told them. Okey Dokey had a fresh supply of T-shirts, sweatshirts and coffee mugs, just in case it got boring, he said.

Bucky Sanders, one of the radio operators and the shipboard electronics technician, assured them that all the exotic radio gear he shared with Paco Sanchez was in A-one condition.

All of the crew members were stowing fresh clothing in the lockers of their accommodations in the hull decks and main deck. Even with the guest cabins on the bridge deck, it was going to be crowded for this voyage. Final packing had people running back and forth to the warehouse, toting cardboard boxes, battered valises and paper sacks full of tacos, rellenos, fried chicken, hargow, dim sum, potato chips, dips and anything else that was not part of the galley menu.

The vessel was docked alongside MVU’s warehouse, bathed in light from the warehouse, the lamp posts on the pier, and the floodlights mounted in the antenna rigging and on either side of the bridge. She appeared pristine in her white paint, with the diagonal yellow stripe swooping up the side of the superstructure. Interior light poured from the bridge windows and the portholes in the superstructure and hull.

On the aft deck, DepthFinder was snugged down against her rails, covered with a yellow tarp. Atlas, one of the small recovery robots, was secured next to her on the starboard side.

“Sneaky Pete?” Brande asked.

“We’ve got two of ’em aboard, Dane, along with SARSCAN,” Sorenson said. “Plus, I’ve backed up the spare parts for damned nearly everything, including computers.”

“Good. How about cable?”

“We’ve got two five-thousand-foot reels of multichannel fiber-optic.”

“Scuba and deep-diving gear?”

“In prime working order, though I doubt that we’re going to go after this reactor with fins.”

“No, but I like to be prepared for anything.”

They took one last tour of the deck, then stopped next to the gangway. Sorenson signaled Fred Boberg, his helmsman on the bridge, and Boberg sounded the air horn twice. It sounded forlorn in the night.

The stragglers emerged from the warehouse and climbed the gangway. Two seamen raised the gangway with the small crane, stowing it on top of the superstructure, behind the guest cabins and next to the eighteen-foot Boston Whaler.

Kaylene Thomas came running out of the warehouse, her arms wrapped around a stack of journals and books.

Brande made the three-foot drop to the pier, met her, and relieved her of her books.

“Did Okey remember to bring his library?” she asked.

“I think so. He’s got a lot of reading to do. But what are you doing?”

“With this much time at sea, I’m going to start reorganizing.”

Brande had not yet announced to the others his decision to relinquish his executive position in favor of Thomas. Despite his glibness at the time, it had come hard. It was like giving up a child he had sired, reared, and nourished.

And then, to his complete surprise, he had felt only relief. Now he could chair a meeting occasionally and spend his time fund-raising or chasing for gold ingots and bronze breastplates. Omit the damned paperwork he hated.

What had come almost as hard to him was admitting to Thomas that he needed her. It might have been his stubborn Swedish heritage — shades of his grandfather — but Brande found such admissions tough to make. And having done it, he again found relief. And he found he was seeing Rae Thomas in a different way. Not one he could describe, particularly, but she was different somehow.

Or maybe he was different. He would have to sort it out sometime.

The Orion’s diesel engines cranked several times, then caught, and a dash of blue smoke escaped from the stern exhaust ports.

Brande handed Thomas’s books up to Sorenson, then said, “Up you go.”

Grasping her waist, he lifted her to deck level, and Sorenson towed her aboard.

“Mel, you take care. You’ve got the new president of Marine Visions aboard. Be nice.”

Under the bright lights, he saw Thomas blush.

Sorenson said, “No shit?”

“No shit.”

“It’s about time, Dane.”

“My grandma used to tell me that frequently.”

Everyone seemed to know more about it than Brande did, he thought.

Sorenson climbed the outside ladder to the bridge wing, then slipped inside.

Brande walked forward along the pier and began releasing the docking lines from their bitts. A seaman named Rogers, on board the ship, stayed with him, pulling the lines aboard. They turned and went aft, releasing those lines also.

“Shut off the lights when you close up, Dane,” Thomas called to him as the Orion engaged her propellers and slipped away from the dock.

“Quit thinking about the cost of electricity,” he called back to her.

He stood alone under the lights of the dock and watched until the Orion sailed out of his view around the point of the Commercial Basin.

“Why is it that progress must always follow tragedy?” Curtis Aaron asked the crowd that surrounded the Ford pickup that was his stage.

The mob, about three hundred strong, did not know. They were waiting for him to tell them.

“Fifty thousand die, and then we learn we should have gotten out of Vietnam earlier.”

“YES!” they yelled.

The bullhorn was heavy, and Aaron lowered it to rest on his left hand during the responses. He was a Vietnam veteran, and he was probably the only one on the pier. His speeches always made frequent reference to the debacle in Southeast Asia.

“A hundred-year-old forest crashes to the ground in Washington, stripping bare the mountainsides, and then we try to recover by planting seedlings that are washed away in the winter snows. A century down the tubes!”

“YES!”

“The oil spreads like thick, deadly blood on the pristine waters of Prince William Sound, killing everything in its path, and then we learn that we need more stringent requirements for tankers and for their operators.”

“YES!”

“How many human beings, seals, cormorants, salmon, sea gulls, whales, and beaches will die before we learn that Nature herself is better suited to governing her flocks?” Aaron asked, more conscious of the rhythm of his deep voice magnified by the bullhorn than of the order of his list.

“Too goddamned many!” somebody yelled, probably Dawn Lengren.

“TOO DAMN MANY!” the crowd echoed.

Aaron let them chant for a while. He smiled at them and looked around. Mark Jacobs of Greenpeace stood leaning against a pier railing, looking back at him. Jacobs had spoken to the crowd earlier but, Aaron thought, with less conviction than was called for in light of the developing news reports. Aaron frequently chided Jacobs for the soft stances that Greenpeace took.

It was more than news reports, of course. Rumors were flying with the agility and speed of F-15 Eagles. The meltdown had already occurred. Fish were dying by the millions, washing up on the beaches. Fishermen had been quarantined. Supermarket chains had already banned the sales of seafood products from Pacific waters.

Rumor or fact, people were frightened. How often could he or Mark Jacobs assemble a crowd this large on the Santa Monica Pier at one o’clock in the morning?

They were an odd lot. A few fishermen, a few freaks that had drifted in from West L. A. and Hollywood, a large number of beach bunnies and surfers, some boating people — judging by their clothing and the pseudo gold braid on the bills of their baseball caps — and a couple of cops. The cops appeared a little nervous as they eyed the weirdos and the louder protesters, and they did not chant along with the crowd.

A chilly wind was blowing in from the sea, breaking against his throat above his navy blue windbreaker. A couple of ships were steaming several miles offshore, but other than that, there was not much marine activity. A fairly steady stream of cars moved along Pacific Avenue. Aaron wondered if their occupants had come down to gawk at the contaminated water.

Donny Edgeworth, Ocean Free’s secretary-treasurer, was at the fringe of the mob, talking on Ocean Free’s only cellular telephone. Edgeworth was a skinny kid with hair so golden it looked green. He was not really a kid, being thirty-five years old, but his slight frame and rampant acne gave most people that impression.

As the chanting died away, Aaron lifted his bullhorn again and said, “And now … ”

“AND NOW…”

“They’ve done it again. Defying Nature, with no concern for the consequences, the powers that be have created yet another catastrophe”

“YES!”

“Doing their best to destroy what God and Nature have provided for mankind.”

“YES!”

“When will they learn to leave alone that which history and fate and nature have given to us?”

Wrong question, or form of question. The mob did not know how to respond.

“Leave it alone!” Aaron said into the mouthpiece. The three words issued from the bullhorn in volume and were blown away by the breeze.

“LEAVE IT ALONE!”

Edgeworth pushed his way through the throng of people as they intoned their new message and craned his turkey neck up toward Aaron.

“LEAVE IT ALONE!”

Aaron leaned down, gripping the rail of the pickup bed. “Curtis, San Diego just called. The Orion has left her port”

“I knew it! Brandeʼs involved. Was he aboard?”

“I don’t know. Becky was too far away to see much.”

“Go find Dawn. I think we’d better trail along on this party”

Edgeworth’s face showed his alarm. “I don’t know, Curtis. You think … uh, you think it’s safe?”

“Who knows, Donny, boy? But we’ve damned sure got a commitment — to ourselves, and to people like these here — to do what’s right. Get going.”

Aaron stood upright and used the bullhorn to reinforce the “Leave it alone!”

The mob voice regained strength, and he slipped over the side of the truck and walked away with that proud chant in his ears.

When he gave a thumbs-up to Mark Jacobs, Jacobs did not acknowledge it.

Mikhail Gurevenich had attempted to sleep for a couple of hours, but unsuccessfully. Illogically, he tried to attribute his restlessness to the fact that they had crossed eastward into a new time zone, but underneath, he knew that his anxiety about what he would find at the end of his journey was increasing steadily.

Also, he suspected that his inability to confide in anyone else — his second in command, even the asinine rookie officer, Lieutenant Kazakov — relative to his concerns and the terrible secret he carried heightened his unease. He kept wishing he had not decoded that second message, or that the message had not ordered him to maintain his silence.

Gurevenich gave up on his nap, rolled out of his narrow bunk, and dressed in a fresh uniform. Leaving his cabin, he prowled through the claustrophobic passageways of the submarine. It was mostly quiet. The high revolutions of the propeller shaft created an irritating whine and a slight vibration in the deck. Except for the crew members on watch, and two enlisted men playing chess in their mess, the men were in their bunks, snoring or dreaming or both. They had nothing to worry about, though certainly the various rumors regarding their high-speed transit would have rippled by now into a thousand even more various rumors.

The captain stopped outside the sonar compartment, then slipped through the light-trapping curtain into the red-lit space.

When the sonar man on duty, Paramanov, looked up, Gurevenich raised his hand to keep him in his seat.

“Have you heard anything of consequence?” he asked.

“It is difficult, Captain, when the Winter Storm is traveling at such speed, to hear much beyond the Winter Storm. An hour ago, I detected a surface vessel. I suspect it was a small freighter, headed east. Other than that, perhaps a whale or two.” Paramanov grinned at his own wit.

Gurevenich estimated they were still some sixteen hours and six hundred nautical miles from the target area.

“Soon, we will begin to encounter other vessels,” he said. “There may be many of them, and you must be careful to identify them.”

“Of course, Captain. There is the Russian submarine and the task forces.”

“I think that there will be others, as well, Paramanov. Take extreme care, for we do not want incidents of international importance.”

The sonarman nodded, but his expression revealed his puzzlement.

Gurevenich turned and left the compartment. Now was not the time for disgorging too much information and fueling the rumor mill that propagated itself aboard any vessel.

He would tell his crew as much as they needed to know, but not sooner than they needed to know it.

In point of fact, he would like to bare his mind, but he was not certain how his crew would react to the knowledge it contained.

Kim Otsuka, rising early from her bed, went forward to the communications compartment and used the ship-to-shore phone to call the Japanese Consulate. She asked for Mr. Sato.

When he came on the line minutes later, sounding sleepy, he greeted her in Japanese.

She replied in her native language. “Mr. Sato, I am calling from the Orion. We are at sea.”

“At sea. But I thought … ”

“I feel that my place is with those with whom I have learned to work, Mr. Sato. The chances for our success are much greater.”

After a short silence, Sato said, “The people at Hokkaido Marine Industries will be very disappointed.”

“I am sorry.”

“As will be your government. To disregard such an invitation…”

“Again, I am sorry. I do not wish to show disrespect, but my value is far greater here.”

Again, there was a short wait before he spoke. “Yes, perhaps you are correct. I will be talking to you again.”

Avery Hampstead had arrived at the headquarters of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, in the middle of the night, but he was still wide awake.

He had slept for most of the overwater journey.

The others in the command center were in varying stages of wakefulness.

Adm. David Potter, CINCPAC, looked a trifle groggy. Cmdr. Harold Evans, the watch commander, did not appear much better, but Hampstead understood that he had been on duty for twelve hours or so.

The Third Fleet’s electronic plotting board had been cleared of inconsequential data, like the movement of potentially hostile capital warships. Instead, only the tracks of shipping aimed at 26 North, 176 East were shown. Next to each blip at the head of black lines were black, block letters identifying the ship. A frigate named the Bronstein and a patrol craft out of Midway were already on the scene. Kirov and the rocket cruiser Kynda were heading small task forces, plowing through the seas eastward at flank speed. Bartlett and Kane were headed west as a pair. Three thin orange lines indicated the tracks of the submarines Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Houston. Dotted lines projected forward from each blip intersected right at the target coordinates.

Technicians milled about in the command center, moving from one console to another, speaking on headsets, keying in new information for the display on their computer keyboards.

The room was completely enclosed. Hampstead did not even have a decent view of Pearl Harbor.

A new blip was suddenly displayed on the plotting board. It was a long, long way away, off the coast of California. It was identified as Orion.

“Hot damn,” Hampstead said. “The Orion checked in, Commander Evans?”

“Just a moment, Mr. Hampstead.” The officer picked up a phone from the table they were seated at, spoke to someone, somewhere for a moment, then said, “Yes sir. She’s en route to the target area.”

“As soon as you can, Hal,” Admiral Potter said, “Get in touch with the master. I’ll want to speak with Brande about my objectives.”

Good luck, Hampstead thought.

He checked his watch, decided it was almost ten o’clock in Washington, give or take an hour, and picked up one of the spare phones in front of him. He dialed his office.

“Angie, this is the boss.”

“What boss? I think they fire you when you don’t show up for work.”

“I’m working in Hawaii this week.”

“I’ll have my bags packed and be on the way in fifteen minutes,” she said.

“Actually, what I need is to have you put all my hot appointments on the back burner.”

“What about the stuff that’s already on the back burner?”

“It goes on the backest back burner.”

“How about your wife?”

“Fortunately, Angie, I already called her.”

He brought her up to date on his activities and his plans, and then he told her to screen all of his calls. He wanted nothing forwarded to him that did not pertain to the downed rocket. “So I’m stuck in the office?”

“You can take long lunches,” he told her.

Then he called Carl Unruh, who was out of the office, but the call was bounced forward to the Situation Room.

“Brande’s on his way, Carl”

“Okay, good. How long?”

“It’s going to be tight as hell. If I’ve got my numbers right, they’ll hit the area on the seventh.”

“Jesus. That doesn’t give them much time before meltdown day.”

“If your experts have their numbers right.”

“They’re still working on it. The President asked them to re-crunch.”

“Yeah, well, that’s just dandy.”

“You didn’t mention the deadline to Brande?” Unruh asked him.

“To one of his people.”

“And they’re still going?”

“Give them some credit, Carl. Marine Visions is loaded with competent people.”

“Still, you shouldn’t have mentioned the deadlines.”

“I’m not good with classified crap,” Hampstead said. “I never know why it’s supposed to be classified. You have anything new?”

“Where are you?”

“CINCPAC.”

“You’ve seen the plotting board?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ve got the latest on ship movements. Except, we think there might be a CIS sub or two closing the area. One of our Ohio-class subs got a sonar signature on the Winter Storm. She was going gangbusters for Midway.”

“I don’t think she can do much when she gets there,” Hampstead said.

“She can start looking. Hell, that’s why we’ve got subs on the way, too.”

“I suppose.” The decision to send subs had not been Hampstead’s.

“Next item, Avery. Half an hour ago, a Candid took off from Murmansk with the Sea Lion aboard. She’s headed for Vladivostok.”

“What will they put her on?”

“One of our KH-1 1s got a few pictures of the port. It looks to us as if the Timofey Ol’yantsev is undergoing a quick retrofit.”

“That’s a destroyer?” Hampstead asked.

“It’s classified as a patrol ship.”

“That would probably work in a bind,” Hampstead said. “Do we know if they shipped any ROVs out of Murmansk along with the submersible?”

“No. Then again, they may have some on hand in Vladivostok.”

“Yes, true. How about the Navy’s deep-diving robot?”

“They flew it out of England this morning, but I think they’re still trying to round up enough cable,” Unruh said. “Another item. A Frenchman named Henrique d’Artilan, who is on the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, with a group including some of our own Nuclear Regulatory Commission people, is on the way to Hawaii. Weʼve told them to check in with CINCPAC at Pearl. I guess you can tell Admiral Potter that he’s hosting the mission control for this.”

“He’ll be happy to hear that, I’m sure.”

Hampstead looked at the plot, visualizing, not only the ships, but aircraft converging on the scene. It was going to be a busy scene.

“What happens, Carl, when all these people, ships, planes, and motor scooters show up in the crash zone at practically the same time?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are we going to have some arguments?”

“Hell, Avery, I’d think everybody would cooperate in the recovery.”

“After setting up a committee, a fact-finding group, and a summit meeting?”

“I’ll mention the possibility to the august group sitting around here,” Unruh said.

From inside Harbor One, the view of the sea was one of murky twilight. At 600 feet of depth, not many of the sun’s rays penetrated.

The view was almost unobstructed for 360 degrees. Harbor One’s construction, similar to that of Ocean Deep, was that of an inverted bowl. It was raised on steel pillars eighty feet above the uneven seabed, and the bowl had a diameter of 100 feet. Within the bowl were three decks. The first, or lowest, deck contained engineering spaces, including the highly important electrolysis unit which extracted oxygen from seawater to feed Harbor One’s atmosphere. Chemical filters cleaned the air, and a very efficient distilling plant provided pure drinking water.

The second deck housed the residential, recreational, sanitary and eating quarters. The top deck, with twenty feet of dome over its center, was an open-space conglomeration of biological, psychological, engineering and oceanographic experiments. Twelve people of the fifteen currently assigned to Harbor One were busily engaged in formulation, testing, or assessment of on-going projects. They hovered over hydroponic tanks, pressure chambers, and computer terminals, performing their complex and, Brande hoped, progressive tasks.

Federal and state funds supported the projects, flowing through the departments of agriculture, commerce, and education, in addition to universities located in California, Massachusetts, Washington, Florida, Texas and Colorado.

He had arrived fifty minutes before by way of Voyager, and he had spent his first twenty minutes saying hello to everyone and checking on their projects, then the next thirty minutes bringing them up to date on what he knew of the CIS rocket disaster.

It was the selected topic of conversation, of course. People who spent a fair share of their working lives on the bottom of the ocean could be expected to be interested in the composition of that ocean.

At the moment, the interior lights were on, and the exterior lights extinguished, so very little of the sea environment was visible. Outside the dome, scenes were viewed through a blue-gray haze. Two sea bass passed directly overhead, and Brande could see a moray eel sniffing the ocean floor some fifty feet to the north. A bluefin tuna that had hung around for nearly a year and was, quite naturally, named Charlie, coasted along behind the bass.

To the northwest, the lights of the small dome of the mining project were dimly visible. It was about 200 yards away, and the agricultural project dome was another quarter-mile beyond it. Both of the smaller domes were connected to Harbor One by thick, Kevlar-shielded cables and tubing that rested on the seabed and carried electrical power and communications links. Both of the smaller domes had their own atmospheric and water-distillation plants.

The larger dome also had a link to the surface, in a Kevlar-shielded fiber-optic cable that rose to a massive, anchored buoy. The buoy sported bells and strobe lights that identified the site of Harbor One to surface vessels and also mounted the radio and satellite antennas necessary to communication between the sea lab and the mainland. Radio waves did not travel beneath the surface very well. They were erratically bent, just as light was bent upon penetrating the surface. For shorter distances, acoustic telephones were adequate for through-the-water conversations, but for long-distance communications, the signals had to be beamed from above the surface.

To the east of Harbor One, Brande saw what he was looking for. A two-man mini-submarine, devised and built in the San Diego shops by Marine Visions and dubbed Neptune’s Daughter, called Dot for short, was hovering a hundred feet away, above the turbine farm.

The sub was intended only for chores of less than 1,000 feet of depth. Its two operators worked from lounge seats placed side by side, and had a pretty fair view of their surroundings from within an aircraftlike, thick canopy. Less than twenty feet long, the sub was currently being used as the control platform for a tethered crawler robot the MVU engineers had named Turtle.

The robot appeared to be a miniature tank. It had a heavy metal body and two sets of rubber-cleated tracks. It crawled along the bottom, guided by the operator in the sub through the Kevlar-shielded fiber-optic cable. There was a small rotatable housing on the top of the body, containing cameras, and there were three manipulator arms mounted to the front of the robot. Each arm had a reach of twelve feet. One arm was designed specifically for cutting and welding operations, one worked like a hand for gripping and lifting, and one had a spinnable wrist. It made short work of installing bolts and nuts. The value of a seabed-crawling robot was found in its leverage — it had footing. Robots that were suspended in the water relied on the power of their thrusters for leverage. It was a basic principle that Brande had learned in a difficult way.

Both of the new turbines, which spun their blades in the current flowing through a narrow canyon and created electrical current for storage in Harbor One’s batteries, were already mounted on the platform imbedded in the seafloor. It looked to Brande as if the robot was completing the final bolt-down.

He turned, went back to the center of the dome, and descended the spiral staircase past the residential deck to the engineering deck. The aluminum railing felt damp in his hand. There was always moisture inside the dome, especially on the dome itself, despite the silica-gel filters and the high pressure of the air inside. Electrical heat tapes applied along the ribs of the dome took the chill off, but it was never entirely warm. Sixty-four degrees was all they could currently maintain without putting an undue strain on the turbine-generators.

Brande could have run a cable to the mainland for power, but the idea had always been to have the sealab operate independently of outside sources, and they were sticking to that philosophy. If he ever shook a spare fifty thousand dollars out of someone’s budget, he would build another turbine-generator and raise the temperature a degree or two.

The engineering deck was divided into a dozen cubicles, and Brande followed a fiberglass-walled passageway until he reached the administrative office. It did not have a door and he walked in unannounced.

It did not have a secretary, either, so there was no one to announce him. Brande had never been disposed to hiring secretaries, probably because he did not know how to use them efficiently.

Andy Colgate was sitting at Rae Thomas’s desk, filling in a log displayed on the computer terminal. When he looked up, he said, “I hope you didn’t find any new leaks, Dane.”

He almost promoted Colgate to Thomas’s old position on the spot, then remembered that promotions were now part of her job description.

“Nothing I don’t recall from my last trip, Andy. Are the guys about through with Turtle?”

“Should be getting close.” Colgate leaned back in his chair so he could look out toward the mini-sub. When he looked back, his expression changed to one of suspicion. “No.”

“No, what?”

“You can’t have him.”

“I need him, I’m afraid, Andy. You can use Atlas for the final connection work on the turbines. I also need Gargantua.”

Colgate wiped his eyes with his knuckles. “Gargantua isn’t operational, you know.”

“I know. We’re going to have to change that situation.” Brande checked his watch. “In about an hour, one of the work-boats will be overhead, and we’ll have to winch both Turtle and Gargantua aboard.”

Colgate stood up, sighing. He was a big man, and his sighs meant something. “I don’t want you irradiating my toys.”

“Promise.”

“I don’t want you irradiating yourself, either.”

“Another promise,” Brande told him.

The two of them left the office and walked down the concrete-floored hallway. It was not quite wide enough for both big men, and Colgate trailed behind.

Skirting the spiral staircase, Brande entered the reception chamber. It was a large triangular area, taking up almost a full quarter of the lower deck pie. Workbenches and large tools lined two of the walls. A thirty-by-ten-foot gap in the floor was enclosed by a similarly sized housing that stood ten feet tall. It was large enough to accept Neptune’s Daughter, which it did regularly. Once the mini-sub was in the chamber, clamshell doors closed beneath her, and air was pumped into the chamber, forcing the water out.

In the floor near the perimeter wall was a small, circular airlock that mated with Voyager.

Seated on wooden blocks next to the head of the subchamber was Gargantua. Celebes — the official name of the robot — looked something like a deflated football with a stubby nose. Almost twelve feet long, and eight feet wide, the body was only thirty inches high. He was standing two feet off the floor on his four retractable legs. His shoes were one-foot diameter, steel pads. No one knew why Gargantua had taken on a male persona. Most nautical machines in the English-speaking world carried a feminine reference.

He had a bit of a head, a bulge, on the bow end. Between his eyes — huge, round floodlights, along with video and 70-millimeter camera lenses — was a small circular housing that contained a fan. That turbine blade, along with another on the stern, controlled his side-to-side rotation. Three circular wells passing clear through the body, two forward and one aft, contained three more turbines. The big blades, powered by massive electric motors, could churn out 12,000 pounds of thrust when operating without a load. A single propeller within a protective band on the stern, controlled fore-and-aft movement. Like Turtle, he had three manipulator arms extending forward from below his head, but these were heavier in appearance, made of cast titanium alloy. They were elbow-and wrist-jointed, and had seven axes of movement. The reach was eight feet.

One of his two-fingered and one-thumbed hands could spread eighteen inches apart, and his grasp would crush Hondas. Conversely, with someone like Dokey at the controls, he could hold a butterfly without damaging it.

Not one of his three arms moved at the moment, the reason he had been beached inside Harbor One.

Despite his virginal white paint and yellow accent stripes, he was not very pretty. The lower life around M VU described him as an upscale cockroach. The nicer people thought he looked like a water beetle on stilts.

Brande did not care. Like Sneaky Pete, Atlas, and Depth-Finder, he had been designed primarily by Brande, and he had a father’s blindness when it came to Gargantua’s physical faults.

“We just haven’t had the spare hours to work on him,” Colgate said. “Dokey was planning to spend some time on it, but got diverted to something else.”

“I know,” Brande told him. “It’s my fault.”

Colgate called a couple of people down and the four of them went to work, first reinstalling Gargantua’s three battery packs. Because of the high electrical drain resulting from use of his big motors, he was required to have his own electrical sources.

Manually, they retracted his arms so they did not take up so much room. Brande made the final circuit around the robot, assuring himself that all of the access doors were firmly secured.

Colgate closed the outer clamshell doors, pumped the chamber dry, then opened the massive doors on the end of the chamber. Rolling a portable hoist into position, Brande lifted Gargantua from the floor, pushed him inside the chamber with help from the others, then attached the hook of a block-and-tackle within the chamber to his lift ring.

Colgate closed the doors, depressurized the chamber, opened the outer doors, and lowered the robot to the ocean floor. By remote control, Colgate released the hook, then retracted the cable.

When Neptune’s Daughter returned to the chamber, they spent two hours detaching Turtle from the sub and installing the Atlas ROV in her place. The robot, with her 250-foot tether wound onto the reel, fit snugly into a nest suspended beneath the bow of the sub.

With Dot moved out of the way, Turtle was then lowered to the seabed. Dot returned to the chamber, and with one of the sub pilots at the controls, took Brande back to the surface.

Mighty Moose, one of the three workboats — old and refurbished tugboats — owned by Marine Visions was waiting for him. With Dot handling the cable-attaching chores on the sea bottom, Gargantua and Turtle were soon winched aboard the workboat.

The three-man crew of the boat; captain, mate and one seaman, helped Brande tie down the robots.

“Okay, Captain Kontas, let’s head for San Diego.”

“Commercial Basin, Chief?”

“No. We’ll visit the Navy.”

Chapter Eight

“Our Candid put down at Vladivostok twenty minutes ago, boss,” Jack Evoy said.

Unruh looked at his watch, just then realizing that he had been napping upright in his chair for some time. He was not entirely certain how long he had been out of contact with the room around him.

He did not remember picking up the phone. One of the aides had handed it to him, perhaps.

The activity around him in the Situation Room seemed to have taken on a sluggishness. People had disappeared. The DCI had left the White House right after lunch, headed for his district office. He had told Unruh, “You stay on top of the operational details, Carl. Let me know if there’s any abrupt change. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can’t coordinate the mess I think is brewing.”

The DCI was responsible for all of the intelligence community, not just the CIA, and all of the intelligence community was hopping at the moment. The FBI was gathering information on internal problems, particularly the rallies erupting near CIS installations. Charts on easels displayed the locations and the intensity of protests that were taking place around the nation. A quick glance told him that the clamor was spreading, working its way eastward from the West Coast.

The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was collating data transmitted from foreign embassies and forwarding it to the Situation Room. More charts depicted the rallies, protests, and near-riots under way, not only in the Pacific-proximity cities of Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai, but also in Paris, London and Cape Town.

The world was pissed off, Unruh figured.

No one really knew what the consequences might be. He supposed some people thought they would see a mushroom cloud erupt over the Pacific, spreading death and mutations from the international date line eastward. That did not happen in a meltdown, but the results were no less tragic in terms of marine ecology. And people would die, no doubt about it.

Shaking the curtain of uneasy sleep from his head, Unruh picked up the coffee mug in front of him and took a sip. It was cold and bitter.

“You still there, boss?”

“Yeah, Jack. Trying to get my head going. The Sea Lion has arrived, huh?”

“Right. And they were waiting for it. Our Keyhole got some shots of the off-loading before it went over the horizon. I imagine they took it right to the port. It’s probably going aboard the Olʼyantsev as we speak.”

“If they were thinking ahead, they’d have done it like Brande’s doing it,” Unruh said.

“No imagination over there,” Evoy concluded.

“We need imagination, as well as luck.”

“So. You want me to stay with what we’re doing?”

The NPIC was monitoring every movement in the region of the downed rocket.

“Sure do.”

“What else is going on? I get to see all the pictures, but I think I’m missing out on something.”

“You’re safe where you are,” Unruh told him, rescanning the charts. “DC and San Francisco police have quadrupled the guard contingents at the CIS embassy buildings and the consulate. There’s nearly five thousand people outside the embassy on Tunlaw Road. It looks as if Americans want justice in the good old lynch mob fashion. We’re not alone, though, Jack. CIS embassies all around the world are under siege”

“With some very good justification. Did you see the press statement?”

“Yes. It fell far short of expectation,” Unruh agreed, “though probably not my expectation.”

The evening newscasts had all repeated the statement released by the CIS President. He mentioned only that a CIS rocket had crashed at sea and that Soviet naval forces were about to recover it. There was no mention of the nuclear reactor contained in the payload module.

The DDO — the Deputy Director for Operations — at the CIA, Oren Patterson, had all of his Russian-based assets attempting to uncover information about the Topaz Four reactor, but so far, Unruh had not heard of any developments.

“How about the other people going to this party?” Unruh asked.

“We’re tracking the same bunch as before, except that we’ve added the Japanese to our list, Carl. They’ve put a research vessel to sea.”

“Okay, babe. Keep me posted.”

Unruh replaced the phone in its cradle on the table. He picked up his coffee mug and carried it to the cart that had been wheeled in early that morning and urged a stream of hot, black juice from the urn. There were a few sandwiches left on a platter, but the bread looked stale, and he could swear the ham was turning green.

He turned and surveyed the room while he tried to coax his nerves to life.

The big electronic plotting board was still tracking the major players, now with the addition of the Japanese vessel, identified as the Eastern Flower.

The population of the Situation Room had begun depleting as soon as the President left early in the morning. Chief of Naval Operations Ben Delecourt and most of the military people had gone back to the Pentagon or Arlington Hall — home of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Bob Balcon, the Chief of Staff, was in and out, checking the plotting board. The National Security Advisor, Warren Amply, was napping in an office across the hall. Everyone was in touch by telephone, beeper or courier.

The State Department bunch had begun arriving in mid-afternoon. After Unruh’s conversation with Hampstead about committees and fact-finding groups and summit meetings, Unruh had begun to worry that diplomacy would get in the way of decisions and action, and he had raised the issue with Balcon. The Chief of Staff, after a tête-à-tête with the President, had called the Secretary of State and asked him to put together a team to deal with negotiations if the need arose.

The State Department negotiation team, eight members strong, sat around the Situation Room, at the table and in chairs along the walls, not doing much of anything that Unruh could see. He was afraid he had started things off in the wrong direction, creating a pre-committee committee.

There was now a representative from the Department of Energy present, and he had been on the phone most of the day, talking to the experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was based in Vienna. Unruh, who had once been posted to Vienna, thought that, if an international commission needed a home somewhere, Vienna was the place to choose.

He was pretty disenchanted with Washington.

Unruh thought about calling Hampstead, but figured the man could calculate flight times on his own and would know that the Sea Lion was charging into the fray.

Charging.

It seemed as if everything moved in slow motion. A state-of-the-art rocket that moved at twenty-five times the speed of sound had triggered the movement of ships that raced along at thirty miles per hour.

He moved to the center of the room and examined the electronic display. The U. S. military ships had been identified with blue blips. The U.S. civilian ship of importance, the Orion, was painted yellow. Someone from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had suggested the color for some reason.

The Japanese ship was coded in green, and the CIS ships were, naturally, red. The projected course of the Winter Storm — the submarine identified by the sonar of the SLBN submarine Michigan — and her current expected position suggested that she would be the first major search vessel to reach the target zone.

Not that there were not other vessels already in the area. A confusion of violet dots was spread over fifty square miles of simulated ocean. Overflights by Navy reconnaissance aircraft had picked out fishing trawlers, freighters, a dozen pleasure craft, sampans, junks and maybe even a canoe. Communications around the world being what they were, almost instantaneous, the word had quickly spread to marine craft, and the gawkers and curiosity seekers had responded. They had converged on the area from Midway, from planned Pacific transit routes, and probably from clandestine smuggling lanes. The Navy frigate Bronstein and the patrol boat Antelope were cruising in the region, but would not make much of a difference, other than advertising an American presence.

The President had vetoed a suggestion to move in some big U.S. cruisers and an aircraft carrier. He did not want the Russians thinking that he was attempting to meet the Kirov and the Kynda with massive firepower. This was not to be a confrontation.

As far as the Navy could determine, not one of the civilian vessels would be helpful in a search of the sea bottom. More than likely, they would impede the search. Adm. Ben Delecourt did not see any course of action for clearing them out of the region short of a few shots across a few bows, and that would not be good public relations for the Navy.

For the life of him, Unruh could not figure out what they were doing there. What was the attraction of impending catastrophe?

He did not want to be there.

He did not want to be here, either.

He thought he would like to be in Vienna.

Orville ʻBullʼ Kontas, captain of the Mighty Moose, had lost track of the times he had circumnavigated the world in one classification of vessel or another. He was not really certain how old he was, either. He had been born in Shanghai of a Greek father and a Chinese mother and, somewhere along the way, had purchased a birth certificate and passport for himself, but the data used at the time had been best guesses.

He was at least seventy years old, Brande thought. The lines on his weathered face had deepened into canyons. The rusty-edged white hair was only a fringe around his bald pate, taking a hop over ears that were big and blistered and shaped like conch shells.

He was strong, undeterred by any weather, and loyal to whichever master he served at the time. He had been with MVU almost since the start, seven years before.

Kontas was at the helm of the Moose when North Island appeared off the port bow. Brande was in the pilot house with him, finishing a plate of refried beans, egg rolls zapped in a microwave oven, a turkey leg and green beans. There was pink lemonade for washing it all down.

Either Kontas had no control over the seaman who also doubled as cook or it was just time to clean out the refrigerator. Or perhaps there was a subtle message being sent, that the operating budgets of the three workboats needed a boost.

Brande would pass the unstated message to Rae Thomas, President and CEO of Marine Visions.

He did, in fact, enjoy that thought. He was not going to miss dealing with some of the more mundane details.

Kontas, not normally an outgoing personality, spoke for perhaps the fourth time in five hours. “Is it gonna be as bad as they say on the radio, Chief?”

Brande got up from his chair, put the empty plate on it, and went to stand beside the captain. The tugboat rose and fell with the heavy swells running.

“I don’t know how it might turn out, Bull. If it does reach meltdown, I guess it could be bad.”

“Won’t happen all at once, will it?”

“No. That is, there would be an explosion, probably not even noticed at the surface, but then everything would take place slowly after that.”

“I don’t understand this atomic shit,” Bull Kontas said.

“I never much wanted to understand it myself,” Brande told him. “The Navy gave me a cram course, but I suspect I missed most of the relevant detail.”

“What’d they tell you?” Kontas eased the helm slightly to port. North Island moved to the right, then centered itself directly over the bow.

“The commander who briefed us said, ‘Picture this: youʼve got two pit bulls who live in neighboring backyards, and they don’t like each other. Every time they see each other, they start growling and snarling and barking, straining to get at each other. Their tempers are rising, generating a lot of heat. So you put a chain link fence between them, maybe they bark a little less. Make it a picket fence, so they can’t see each other clearly, they bark a little less. Make it a solid fence, so they can’t see each other at all, and they quit barking and cool down.’”

“What the fuck’s two dogs got to do with it?”

“A nuclear reactor works the same way, Bull. In the core of a reactor is a fissionable fuel, normally Uranium-235, a nonfissionable moderator, and control structures. One fission reaction produces one more fission in a chain reaction. A steady output of energy in the form of heat is released.” Each uranium atom kicked out 2.5 neutrons, on average, during fission, and one went on to create another reaction. Brande remembered that from some physics class he had taken.

“Heat?”

“That’s right. When the atom in the fissionable material splits, a neutron is absorbed in another fissionable atom to create another fission. That produces heat, and the heat is transformed into electrical energy.” Twenty-three million megawatt hours of heat energy for each kilogram of U-235, Brande had been told.

“And this whole thing don’t go hog-goddamned-wild?” Kontas asked.

“For two reasons. One is the moderator. To slow down the reaction, the core contains a moderator. In the United States, water is generally used. In an accident situation, such as occurred at Three Mile Island, the water tends to serve as a coolant and helps to restore stability. In Russia, Bull, the core cylinders are made of blocks of graphite which is used as the moderator. When Chernobyl Four got out of hand, the graphite moderator burned and didn’t help to cool it down.

“Beyond the moderator, water is normally used as the coolant, and it transmits the heat to the boilers or turbines that are used to generate electricity. The old boys at Los Alamos think the Russian reactor aboard the rocket uses freon as the coolant.”

Bull Kontas was not interested in moderators or coolants. “What about the goddamn dogs?”

“That’s the second reason. In the reactor core are a series of control rods. When they’re raised, the reaction begins. When they’re lowered, like that fence between the dogs, the atoms can’t see each other, and the fission process cools off. The experts tell us that, when the rocket launched, the control rods were probably most of the way down, with almost no energy output. That’s what they call subcritical. When the rods are raised enough to allow one fission reaction to produce one more fission reaction, they call it critical. When the A2e crashed, the experts think that automatic controls were probably damaged, and the control rods may have been raised. That allows the reactor to go supercritical.”

“So it goes boom?”

“Well, not like an atomic bomb, no. The heat and the pressure keep building until it reaches the meltdown stage and has to release its gasses somewhere. At Three Mile Island, they were released into a containment facility, so not much radioactivity got into the atmosphere. At Chernobyl, effective containment was lacking when the coolant system exploded. That lack of safety has been a major criticism of Russian reactor designs.”

“Same thing here, huh?”

“Maybe. Our experts think that, because of its lightweight design, and because of Russian design history, the Topaz Four doesn’t have effective containment. If the reactor runs wild, and the coolant system breaks down, the pressure may build enough to blow out the containment compartment. It will then release its radioactivity into the ocean currents, where it will slowly spread throughout the sea. Additionally, it will take around thirty years for the uranium fuel to lose its radioactivity. While it’s not quite as bad as a release into the atmosphere, where it spreads widely, it’s still not good. Water tends to dissolve the radioactive waste, but we’d still have a hell of a lot of dirty water following the Pacific currents. The problem isn’t a major explosion, Bull. The problem is thirty years of dissipating radioactivity.”

“That’s what Chernobyl’s doing?”

“No. At least, it’s not spreading the radioactivity. They went in afterward and poured concrete all around reactor number four. That sealed it, but it was a little too late. Thirty-one people died, and I suspect a lot more are at risk. In this case, we’re worried about the effects on marine life — fish, seals, seaweed, everything.”

“It could spread, huh?”

“I think so. It might envelope the entire ocean. And that means ecology, people, fishing, tourism, mining, drilling.”

“You’re going to seal this one?”

“We’ll try to retrieve it before it blows, and then we’ll let the big boys decide what to do with it.”

“You need any more help, Chief, I ain’t been doing much lately.”

“I appreciate that, Bull. If I need you, I’ll yell.”

The low sun reflected off the windows of the coast guard station on Point Loma, to their left. On the right, Brande could distinguish some movement on Coronado Beach. Sunbathers and swimmers who did not care about radiated surf. Or who maybe wanted to get in as many sun days as they could before something happened to spoil their avocations.

The long trip in from Harbor One had not eased Brande’s impatience. It was often that way. He suspected that his lazy, hazy days of youth, when the major activity of the year was the week the custom combiners came through to harvest the wheat, was the reason he had learned to crave action. The harvester gangs were to be envied. They were on the move, going somewhere, doing something, if only a brawl in a local, but strange, saloon. Brande’s hyperactivity was confined to driving a truck alongside a combine, accepting the discharge of golden wheat, and delivering the load to the grain elevator. In the evenings, he would take out the fifteen-foot, aluminum runabout with the 35-horsepower Evinrude that had been his first boat.

In the years after leaving Minnesota, Brande had gotten involved with snow skiing, skydiving, hang gliding and sports-car racing, in addition to his scuba and deep-sea diving. Anything that pumped the adrenaline a little faster. Most of his avocations had fallen by the wayside as his involvement in Marine Visions became total. He gave up a Shelby Cobra that he used to drive in road rallies in favor of the Pontiac Bonneville.

Brande stood in the small pilot house, his feet braced wide against the sway of the deck, and thought that he would have made the attempt on the Topaz Four by himself if he had had to do it that way.

He just needed to be doing something.

The Timofey Olʼyantsev put to sea even before the submersible Sea Lion was fully secured to her stern deck, aft of the stern gun turret. By the time the patrol ship cleared the breakwater and drove into Peter the Great Bay, it was making its top speed of thirty-two knots.

The skies were still overcast, a dead gray cement that pressed down inexorably on spirits. At any moment, Oberstev expected them to begin spitting snow particles.

Col. Gen. Dmitri Ivanovich Oberstev, as befitted his status, had been given the captain’s quarters aboard the ship, and the captain had displaced his first officer. Oberstev’s aide, Colonel Cherbykov, had been assigned to share the second officers’ quarters. Lt. Col. Janos Sodur had been placed in a second bunk installed in the engineering officer’s cabin.

He had, in fact, suggested that Janos Sodur wait in Vladivostok with Chairman Yevgeni and Admiral Orlov, but the chairman had insisted that, “Colonel Sodur is assigned as a liaison to my committee, General Oberstev. It is appropriate that he accompany you.”

And, therefore, Yevgeni had his ears close to Oberstev’s mouth.

Oberstev’s decision to board the patrol ship and accompany it to the area of operations had come after hours of sitting around the table in the converted Vladivostok officers’ mess, listening to the reports coming in, listening to Yevgeni attempt to overrule Adm. Grigori Orlov’s decisions, and twiddling his thumbs.

With the Olʼyantsevʼs captain, Leonid Talebov, Oberstev, Cherbykov and Sodur left the bridge and went down one deck and aft to the Combat Information Center.

In the semi-darkened compartment, the duty operations officer pointed out on the electronic map the positions of various ships.

The submarines Winter Storm and Tashkent did not appear because no one knew where they were. There were a few guesses, but they were not displayed.

There were now two new symbols on the screen, not identified.

“Lieutenant,” Oberstev asked, pointing out the targets, “What are these?”

“Our agents in Japan indicate that the Eastern Flower, a new oceanic research vessel, has departed Sagami Bay, Comrade General. It is said to have a completely new deep-diving submersible aboard. Then, in addition to the naval research vessels Bartlett and Kane, the CIS Consulate in San Francisco reported that the vessel Orion has left San Diego. Both positions on the map, General, are currently estimated since we have not yet had a satellite pass over either.”

“And in the AO?”

“A variety of shipping,” the duty officer said. “Sightseers, very likely, in addition to two U.S. Navy surface vessels.”

Oberstev removed his glasses and polished the lenses. Every new piece of information proved more dismal than the last. It was a circus that was gathering, and he foresaw that there would be accidents.

Accidents, barriers, obstacles he did not need, not if he were to recover from this incident and get the Red Star project back on course.

“Captain Talebov, what is your best estimate for our arrival in the AO?”

“It will be four days, General. On the morning of the seventh of October.”

“And the Americans?” Sodur asked. “When will they reach the area?”

“The Bartlett and the Kane may arrive by evening on the third,” the operations officer said.

“We are going to be too late,” Sodur lamented. “The Americans will steal our technology.”

Ignoring the pessimistic officer, Oberstev turned to his aide. “Alexi, what do we hear from Plesetsk?”

“Director Piredenko, with assistance from the nuclear laboratory, devised a computer model of the impact, General. The scientists believe that, no matter which side the payload compartment landed on, it is likely that…” — Cherbykov consulted his notebook — “the F-two-six module, which controls the solenoids that operate the control rods, would have been severely damaged. The computer model suggests that the control rods may have been moved to the ninety-six percent open position”

“Which means?” Oberstev asked, impatient at the details.

“The nuclear mass will rise to a supercritical state. The freon coolant, providing that the pumps continue to operate, may alleviate the heat for several days.”

“Give me a date, Alexi. Please.”

“No earlier than 1800 hours, September eight, General.”

“And?”

“No later than 2400 hours, September nine,” Cherbykov reported.

To the obvious chagrin of every person in the combat information center. They all stared at Oberstev.

“Perhaps,” he said, “it is time to tell the world. The ships in the affected area should be warned.”

“I disagree, Comrade General,” Sodur said. “We have a great deal of time available to us, as yet. We will recover the reactor and neutralize it.”

The patrol ship’s captain cleared his throat and said, “I am not certain that you understand the difficulties involved, Colonel Sodur.”

“Our Navy has always vaunted its expertise,” Sodur countered.

“Our ability to make the recovery is not in question,” Leonid Talebov said, “but the amount of time in which to do it certainly is.”

“Then we should communicate with Chairman Yevgeni and listen to his recommendation.”

Oberstev was not the only one to stifle a sigh. They all knew what Yevgeni would say.

At most, they would have two days!

The telephone rang in Overton’s room, jarring him from a nap that had been encouraged by three Mai Tais.

He rolled over on the bed, his bare back prickling from the stiff breeze pouring through the open French doors to the balcony, and grabbed at the phone.

“Wilson.”

“Ned, Will. I’ve got you a ride.”

“Plane to Midway?” Overton asked, hopeful.

“Nope. No boats available at Midway,” Nelson explained. “We managed to charter a cruiser out of Maui called the Oversight. Fitting, huh?”

Suspicious, Overton asked, “Who’s ‘weʼ?ˮ

“Well, it’s tough, finding boats that will go into the area. Expensive, too.”

“Come on, Ned.”

“Bunch of us got together, to share the cost.”

“Bunch of who?”

“Couple newspapers…”

There went his exclusive coverage.

“Couple radio stations … ”

And the immediacy.

“And three network camera teams.”

“Goddamn it!”

“Sorry, Will. You know how it is.”

Overton slammed the phone down.

Curtis Aaron was at the helm of the Queen of Liberty. Sometimes, he liked to take control.

The horizon ahead still carried the red hues of sundown, though the sun had disappeared some time before.

The seas were running smoothly, and the Queen, a sixty-foot wooden-hulled Chris-Craft that had been built in 1959, cut through them nicely.

Next to him on the flying bridge, under the canvas sun shield, Dawn Lengren studied the radar screen, her forehead pressed against the hood that protected the screen. She was wearing cut-off jeans and a skimpy halter top. Her leaning position gave him an instrument panel-lit view of her small cleavage, the shadows moving erotically over her skin. Aaron was aware of stirrings, and he was beginning to think about retiring for the night. Let someone else steer the barge for the next eight hours.

“Anything, Dawn?”

She sat back in the cushioned seat. “There’s lots out there, Curtis, but I can’t tell what’s what. They may be freighters and tankers.”

“We’re looking for a boat headed west.”

“I know that. I count seven on the thirty-mile scan. Look at it yourself.”

Aaron would not have known the difference himself. “No, I believe you. We’re bound to intersect them somewhere along the line.”

“Maybe Jacobs knows where he’s going,” Lengren said, implying that Aaron did not know.

He turned his head and looked aft on the right side. A half-mile away, the Arienne, a Greenpeace boat, was showing her running lights. No matter how Jacobs might snub Aaron from time to time, he had certainly been quick to follow him out of Santa Monica.

“I doubt it, Dawn. He’s keying on us.”

“Yeah, but … ”

Her voice was drowned out by the abrupt high-pitched roar of engines.

Aaron almost ducked.

A four-engined airplane shot overhead, headed west. Aaron would swear that it was less than a thousand feet above the water.

“Dumb bastard,” Dawn said.

The inside of the Navy C-130 Hercules was spartan. Wiring and hydraulic conduits snaked along the ceiling and fuselage walls. There were rattles, metal against metal. The rollers in the floor chittered. The four Alison turboprops roared throatily, dissuading attempts at conversation.

Brande sat in one of the pull-down, canvas seats against the left side of the cavernous cargo bay. He wore a set of headphones that diminished the noise of the engines and let him listen in on the intercom chatter of the crew and the radio dialogue of the pilots.

In front of him, centered in the bay, were Turtle and Gargantua. The smaller robot was aft, and both rested on wooden pallets. The floor and the aft, lowerable ramp were made up of aluminum rollers, and the pallets were locked in place by nylon tie-downs. Since they did not have any windows, the cargo master had lowered the ramp while in flight in order to give them a view, but the view was of an endless blue sea. The twilight had deepened into grayish gloom, and the sea looked like darkened concrete. Brande figured the surface was just about as hard as concrete.

Strapped around the perimeter of both ROVs was a heavy-duty polyvinyl sac which, with any luck at all, would be inflated by C02 cartridges at the proper time.

Brande was dressed in a dark blue wetsuit which had the MVU logo embossed above his left breast. On the canvas seat beside him was a battered white helmet that the Navy apparently did not mind losing since they had lent it to him with no proviso for its return. He was strapped into a deflated Mae West and main and reserve parachutes for which the Navy would probably bill him. His civilian clothes were packed into a small waterproof bag hooked to his belt.

Over the headset, he heard one of the pilots make a call, obviously on the marine band. “Orion. This is Baker Two Two.”

“Baker Two Two, Orion. I think we see your lights. The voice was female, and Brande thought it belonged to Connie Alvarez-Sorenson.

“I’ll blink them for you, if you do the same for me. We’re at nine-five-zero feet.”

“Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine,” she said and, after a moment, noted, “I’ve got you.”

“And I’ve got you,” the pilot said. Off the air, and on the intercom, he added, “I wish.”

“She’s married, Lieutenant,” Brande said.

“Always my kind of luck, Mr. Brande. I’m going to make a wide three-sixty, and then we’ll come in directly over the ship. Ejection will be a mile ahead of her. You’ll get greens in about six minutes.”

“Fine by me,” Brande said. “Thanks for the ride, Lieutenant.”

“Good luck, sir.”

Brande released his lap belt and stood up. He exchanged the headset for the helmet, pulled it on, and tightened the chin strap. He bent over and struggled with his flippers, finally slipping the straps behind his heels.

He felt bulky and clumsy in the parachute harness and life vest.

As the plane went into a shallow bank, the cargo master made a trip around each of the ROVs, releasing all but one restraining line.

“Need any help, sir?” he asked Brande.

“I think I can hobble my way out, Chief.”

Lifting his feet high to clear the swim fins, Brande worked his way back to the ramp. When the chief petty officer lowered it to slightly below level, he stepped out onto it, walked halfway out, and waited, hanging onto the hatchway jamb with a firm grip.

The windstream whipped at the mass of his gear and stung his eyes.

Peering out, he could see the lights of several ships behind, to the east. The sea was almost dark now, the altitude deceptive. It was going to be a short fall, and he was not going to have time for sightseeing, anyway.

Looking back, he saw that the cargo master had turned on the white strobe lights attached to the top of each ROV. His eyes had become accustomed to the softly red-lit interior of the bay, and each flash of the strobes felt like fire. Brande checked to make sure his six-celled flashlight was strapped tightly to his harness.

Pulling the Plexiglas visor down, he looked up at the jump lights.

The red was on.

He shifted his head and returned to staring out the back of the aircraft.

The red and green running lights of Orion passed directly below.

The jump lights went green.

The cargo master released the restraint on Turtle as the nose of the C-130 tilted upward.

Turtle rolled backward on the floor rollers, hesitated crossing onto the ramp, rolled some more, went past Brande, and dropped off the end of the ramp.

The static line connected to the overhead cable in the cargo compartment went taut, then slackened and streamed out behind the Hercules.

Seconds later, Brande saw the white mushroom bloom in the night, below and behind them. The locator strobe light winked at him. He could not see whether or not the inflatable pods deployed.

He crossed his fingers.

Gargantua began lumbering down the incline. Brande could feel the vibration through his feet as the 3,000-pound monster crossed the ramp, passing within two feet of him.

Plunged off the end.

Static line jerked straight.

Brande gave the sergeant a thumbs-up, and the man signaled an okay with his thumb and forefinger.

Brande released his grip on the doorjamb, took five giant steps, and fell off the end of the ramp.

The windstream flattened him immediately, he counted to two, and pulled the ripcord.

The roar of the aircraft engines diminished as the drogue chute streamed out of the pack with a whistle, then jerked the canopy after it.

He began to come upright with the drag of the drogue chute, and when the canopy popped and filled with air, he was ready for the abrupt slowing in his descent.

Reaching upward, he fumbled in the dark for the steering handles, found them, and got a grip on them with both of his hands.

Ahead, he could see the lights of the vessel, the single parachute supporting Turtle, and the three canopies clustered above Gargantua. Since he was above them, he did not have a direct view of the strobe lights. The canopies illuminated with each pulse of the strobe.

Brande tugged his right steering handle, side-slipped to the right, then added pressure to the left handle, picking up forward speed, closing in on Gargantua.

When he was fifty feet away, and saw that the tubing around the ROV had inflated, he eased up on the handles and tried to determine his altitude.

He could not do it.

The darkness of the sea kept that secret.

Turtle splashed down.

Brande braced himself.

Gargantua tapped a few wave tops before settling into the water, raising spigots of white water.

Brande saw the potential for slamming himself into the ROV, dumped air from the chute, and crashed into the surface a little harder than he had planned.

He went deep under, tumbling a bit as he slowed. The water was mildly cool on his face, and felt saline fresh. He pulled the flashlight loose, slapped the quick-release buckle on the harness, then pulled the cord on the Mae West. He resisted struggling with the harness and methodically worked his way out of it.

As the vest filled, he began to rise, aided by strong kicks with the fins. When his head cleared the surface, he took a deep breath and shook his head. The water drained from his hair. He felt good and was halfway sorry he had not jumped from a higher altitude. Almost three years had passed by since his last parachute jump.

Gargantua was less than twenty feet away, riding low in the water, rising and falling on three-foot seas. His strobe light made him think of ambulances, and he was happy he did not have to call for one.

His own parachute was collapsed behind him, floating on the sea. There were a couple million more stars in the clear sky than in the skies over San Diego. Venus was bright.

Brande rolled onto his stomach and swam until he reached the ROV and got a grip on one of the lines holding the inflation pod in place. Releasing the chin strap, he slipped the helmet off and let it go to the bottom. Someday, some salvage diver might find it and spend two or three weeks looking for the rest of the wreckage.

Reaching under the water, Brande got a thumb under one, then the other, of the fin straps and pushed them off his feet. He tossed the fins on top of the flotation pod, then using the retaining line, pulled himself out of the water. Gargantua heeled sharply as a wave went under her. He stood up and released the parachute rigging, then leaned against the ROV while waiting for the Orion to close on him.

She was coming hard, not backing off the throttles until she was a quarter-mile away.

As she slowed and came alongside, searchlights flared. Do-key yelled down at him from the main deck, “Nice of you to drop in, Chief!”

“I had a free weekend,” Brande called back.

The port side of the research vessel eased up against the flotation pod, and Brande caught the crane cable Dokey swung toward him, slipped the hook under Gargantua’s lift ring, and stood back as the winch groaned and the cable tautened.

Turtle’s strobe light was beating about fifty yards away, and Brande shoved the flashlight inside his belt, pulled his fins on, then dove back into the sea, surfaced, and used a strong crawl to swim toward her.

By the time he reached the robot and looked back, Gargantua was in the air, causing the Orion to heel a trifle. The vessel came around, heading toward him, as the big ROV was settled slowly to the deck next to DepthFinder and tied down.

Brande released the parachute rigging and sat on Turtle’s back as she was raised from the sea and then lowered to the deck to the right of the submersible, behind Atlas. When she was in place, Brande released the cable of the starboard crane, then slid off to the deck.

Most of the crew was in attendance, as were Dokey, Otsuka, Emry and Dankelov. Brande released his unweighted weight belt and freed the pouch containing his clothes. He unclipped the Mae West and shrugged out of it.

“Coffee’s on,” Dokey told him. He was wearing a T-shirt depicting an artistic shark with beret and palette and brush and easel, painting a picture of a porpoise. Brande assumed the porpoise was nude. It was difficult to tell the difference between formal and casual porpoise wardrobes.

“Let’s get some of it,” Brande said.

They went forward and entered the superstructure by a side door. Halfway across the cross-corridor, Brande turned into the wardroom.

Sorenson, Mayberry, Roskens, Polodka and Thomas had three tables pulled together, mugs, coffeepots and plates of Danish scattered across them.

The chatter was lively, similar to that on the start of many expeditions they had all undertaken. Underlying the dialogue this time, though, was an undercurrent of tension. Then, too, while there had been many expeditions in seven years, this was the first time all of them had shipped together on a single outing.

Brande went into the galley, stripped out of his wet suit, and pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt. He carried his running shoes and socks back into the wardroom, sat down, and pulled them on.

“How we doing, Mel?”

The captain said, “We’re five hundred and ninety nautical miles out of San Diego, Dane. On course, and flying.”

That was about 300 nautical miles more — over ten hours — than they would have been if the Orion had detoured to Harbor One to retrieve the robots.

The thrum of the diesels could be felt in the steel deck, despite the carpeting.

The television set in one corner of the wardroom was tuned to CNN, with the sound off and Bernard Shaw mute, capturing the signal with a satellite antenna.

Brande reached out for a coffeepot and poured a mug full. He asked, “Anything new on the tube?”

“The White House confirmed that the rocket carried a nuclear reactor,” Thomas said. “I think they’re trying to contain all the rumors that are flying around.”

“Did they downplay it?”

“What else?” she said. “Indirectly, anyway. The spokesman offered a comparison between the Topaz’s estimated fifteen megawatts and San Onofre in California at over eleven hundred megawatts”

“Also,” Larry Emry added, “about ten thousand college kids breached the CIS Embassy in Tokyo. The Japanese Defense Forces retrieved the embassy personnel in the nick of time by helicopter. The last we heard, something similar is happening in Seoul.”

“Ten thousand?”

“Somebody may be exaggerating. Then again, maybe not. There’s a little hysteria in the air.”

Brande recalled images of the Saigon Embassy in 1975, with choppers lifting off the roof. He could not help but think that the Russians deserved having their turn, too.

“I guess I’m going to worry about only the things over which I might have some control,” he said. “Kim, did you talk to your consulate?”

She nodded, her dark, shining hair reflecting the overhead lights. “Yes, Dane. They were not extremely happy, but they acquiesced.”

‘Valeri? Svetlana?”

Dankelov, as moody, as deep in thought as ever, only bobbed his head in affirmation.

Under the harsh lights of the wardroom, Polodka’s face appeared flushed. She said, “We offered our services, but apparently they were not needed. I was assured that CIS naval forces have everything well in hand.”

Dankelov looked over at her, but quite impassively. Brande wondered what was going on between the two of them now. He knew there had been a short-lived affair, and he had hoped at the time that it would blossom for them. It had not, and it had not affected their work, but he was certain there was some strain between them.

“All right, then. I guess we’re a team again. Larry, you’re in charge of exploration. What are we going to do when we get there?”

Emry wiped a trace of coffee from his mustache, then leaned forward in his chair and put his arms on the table. “I’ve installed our best oceanographic maps of the area back in the lab. Bob and I have been going over what’s known about the depths and the temperatures and calculating our sonar coverage at various depths. We should have final figures in the morning, which we’ll double-check with the Navy, and then I’ll lay out a search grid on top of the map. After we have some consensus, we’ll put it up on the computer.”

“Starting where, Larry?”

“I calculated a trajectory for the rocket, Dane. Knowing that it was at ninety thousand feet when it went over Tokyo helps to define its attitude when it hit the sea. All stages were apparently still attached, including the offset booster rockets. Anything could have happened immediately after it splashed down, and I suspect that it broke up. Still, my best guess is that it was nose down at about one hundred ten degrees from the vertical. It went in at one-seventy-six degrees, ten minutes, twenty-three seconds east, and my first judgment is that it drifted east as it sank. We’ll start there and work our way eastward first. Our north and south legs will get longer as we go east, anticipating that the wreckage could have veered farther north or south the farther east it went. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you how far apart our legs will be.”

Brande knew the problems involved. Robert Ballard found the Titanic some twelve nautical miles from her last reported position before she went down, and that was in water depths of 13,000 feet. Poorly reported navigational positions, wind and water currents all contributed to the fact that she lay undiscovered for seventy-three years.

“We’ll have to fly sonar from the DepthFinder,” Brande said.

“Oh, I think so, with those depths,” Emry agreed.

“I’ll make up crew lists and work shifts,” Brande said. “Let’s all get a good night’s sleep, and crank off in the morning. Okey, Valeri, Svetlana and Kim, your first priority is going to be Gargantua. If we don’t have an operable robot, it won’t much matter whether or not we find the Topaz.”

The team members finished their coffee and stood, drifting from the wardroom. Dokey said, “You lucked out, Chief. You’re rooming with me in Cabin A.”

“I’ll try not to feel honored, Okey.”

Thomas stayed at the table across from him and waited until the others had departed. She had a fresh tinge of sun on her normally pale skin, and her platinum hair was windblown. Despite her long day, she looked as fresh as the sea had felt to Brande when he parachuted into it.

“Bad news,” she said.

“I don’t want to hear it.” He grinned. “You’re the president. You deal with it.”

“You’re chairman. You need to know.”

“Tell me.”

“Jim Word called. They ran out of debris field.”

“Already?”

“Already. He and George Dawson recovered fourteen ingots, one cannon barrel, six goblets, and two plates. That’s it.”

“Damn, Rae. That won’t go far, will it?”

“No.”

“There must be some good news,” he suggested.

“On some of the ingots, they’ve got numbers, and they’ve got the name of a manufacturer on the cannon barrel.”

“So we can check the Spanish archives and maybe determine the ship that carried them.”

“End of the good news,” she said.

“Well, we know the rest of the ship must be in the same area.”

“East, west, north, or south?” she asked.

“One of those.”

“Are we going to waste time looking?” Thomas put her emphasis on wasting time.

“Your decision,” he said. He ached to make it himself, but knew he would opt for wasting time. And money.

“Really?”

“It’s what you wanted. I’m doing my damnedest to stay out of your hair.”

“It hasn’t even been a full day yet,” she said.

“See how good Iʼve been?”

Thomas shook her head from side to side. “I don’t know if this is going to work out.”

“Sure it will.”

“I mean, I don’t know if the company is going to survive, assuming the chief personnel survive this escapade. You’re risking all of the prime principals, you know?”

“I know, Rae. I know. If it looks like we won’t make it, I’ll pull out.”

She studied his face for a very long moment, then asked, “Promise?”

“Cross my heart.” He did, with his forefinger. “My grandma taught me that”

“I’d like to have met your grandma.”

“You’d have loved her”

“I’d have told her about some of the things she missed in rearing you.”

Brande smiled. “What things?”

“Another time, Dane. How much cash will we realize from Dawson?”

“Maybe a million-one.”

“I had hoped for more.”

“In this business, it’s hope that carries you forward, Rae. But you can’t hope for too much, either.”

She gave him a strange look. “Don’t preach, Dane. I’m well aware of that.”

The Los Angeles had been running at a depth of sixty feet, her antennas deployed, so she could exchange messages with CINCPAC and the Kane.

As she returned to a hundred feet of depth, Cmdr. Alfred Taylor left the control center and went aft to the sonar room, located on the starboard side of the submarine, off the electronic warfare room.

Neil Garrison, the executive officer, was conferring with the chief sonarman, CPO Jim Tsosie. The sonar expert was a full-blooded Navajo with hearing that could distinguish between a pin or a needle dropped on a linoleum floor, or close to it.

The sonar room was crammed with a sophisticated computer used to analyze sounds and frequencies picked up by the submarine’s sensors. The waterfall display, a video screen mounted on one bulkhead, provided visual evidence — bright lines and dots — of bearings to potential targets.

At the moment, the screen displayed six targets.

“What have we got, Chief?” Taylor asked.

“The Philadelphia is closest, Skipper. She’s running parallel to us at five thousand yards, and the blade count says she’s doing thirty-one knots.”

Taylor would never have inquired into Tsosie’s accuracy. If he did not recognize it, the computer’s data banks could match the distinctive propeller signatures of thousands of friendly and hostile craft.

“Farther to the north, and thirty nautical miles behind us, are the Kane and the Bartlett. With the speed these ships are making, Skipper, no one’s trying to hide a sound. It doesn’t make the reading a lot easier, of course, because of the noise we’re making ourselves.”

“What about the other three targets?”

“I have not identified them specifically, sir. To the south, that one has to be a supertanker. She’s on a heading for Japan. To the west, those are smaller boats, both twin props. They’re probably yachts of some kind, and they’re falling into our track”

“Thanks, Chief. Neil?”

“It looks as if we’re going to have a lot of company on-site, Captain.”

“CINCPAC says there’s some forty private vessels in the area or on the way to it. Chief, one of the first things you’ll need to do, once we get there, is identify the nonessential vessels, so you can squelch them out.”

“Aye aye, Skipper.”

“Also, Neil, the Kane will be the operation commander.”

“Do we know the captain?” Garrison asked.

“John Cartwright. His background is in oceanographic research, so he should be helpful.”

Taylor passed one of his messages to Garrison. “Then, it seems that CINCPAC is gathering a whole bunch of experts. This is the search grid they’ve laid out for us. I want you to plot it so we can get familiar with it.”

“Are the Philadelphia and the Houston getting the same stuff?”

“They’ll be getting similar instructions as they surface to receive them. At 2400 hours, we’re scheduled to make contact with them to establish coordination.”

Garrison grinned. “Did you ever try to coordinate an orgy, Skipper?”

Taylor grinned back. “It’s getting worse. There’s a CIS patrol ship with a submersible on the way, as well as a Japanese research vessel.”

The executive officer glanced at his watch. “Eighteen hours to go, Skipper. Then it gets confused.”

“The Russians will get there first,” Taylor said. “It may be all over in eighteen hours.”

“You a betting man?” Garrison asked.

“All stop,” Captain Mikhail Gurevenich said. He had decided to surface slowly by pumping out water ballast rather than driving up on the diving planes. There were too many surface vessels present.

“All stop,” echoed the seaman manning the engine room telegraph.

The captain felt the Winter Storm go sluggish as she lost headway. The silence seemed intense after so many hours at top speeds. When the speed log displayed five knots, he ordered, “Come to the surface, Lieutenant Mostovets.”

“Blowing ballast, Captain.”

The lines and tanks hissed as compressed air forced water from the ballast tanks, located between the pressure and outer hulls and in the bow.

“Control Center, Sonar.”

Gurevenich leaned toward the communications panel on the bulkhead next to him and depressed the intercom button. “Control Center.”

“I now have thirty-one contacts within five kilometers, all around us,” Sonarman Paramanov said, “The closest is fifty meters off the port bow.”

“Identifications?”

“I estimate that they are primarily civilian vessels, Captain. The U.S. naval frigate Bronstein has been computer-identified. It is at one-one-thousand meters, bearing one-three-seven. There is a gunboat of the Antelope class a thousand meters beyond the frigate.”

“Thank you.” Gurevenich released the button.

He wanted to bring up the periscope and scan the seas around him first, but that would only delay matters.

The deck took on a bow-up slant as the submarine rose toward the surface.

“Twenty meters depth and rising,” the planesman called out in a flat tone.

Gurevenich crossed to the conning tower ladder and began to climb it, Mostovets following behind him. The junior officer aboard, Lieutenant Kazakov, trailed along. He was earnest, but slow to learn, and he always seemed to be underfoot.

As he reached the hatch, the sail broke the surface, and through the twin skins of the submarine, he heard the seawater cascading from the tower, crashing to the sea and the emerging hull.

He waited a few moments, spun the wheel to undog the door, then pushed hard. The hatch swung open, and salty water spilled down, splashing his shoulders, leaving dark, wet patterns on his uniform blouse.

Scrambling up the final rungs of the ladder, Gurevenich emerged into the bridge area of the sail. He stood upright, his head above the sail, breathed deeply of the salty air, and made a full turn as he scanned the seas around him.

“Unbelievable,” Mostovets said as he climbed from the hull and joined the captain.

The skies were dark, with a towering cloud bank blotting out the stars to the northeast. The seas were relatively smooth, with two-to three-foot swells. Wavelets crashed whitely on the hull.

But all around them were the red and green running lights, along with a few white anchor lights, of a mishmash of vessels. The nearest ship, off the port bow, appeared to be an interisland ferry, perhaps seventy meters in length. The porthole lights were lit in neat rows. Dozens of people strolled the side decks and leaned against the railings, staring outward at…what?

Gurevenich had never surfaced his submarine at sea among so many vessels before. It seemed dangerous for a craft that relied on stealth.

“Conning tower lights, Lieutenant.”

“Lights, Captain?”

“As I said.”

Mostovets gave the order, and the exterior conning tower lights came on, clearly illuminating the red star painted on the side of the sail.

Mikhail Gurevenich wanted these stragglers and gawkers to know that there was a CIS presence in the area. He did not quite know how to tell them that he would brook no interference in the performance of his duties.

The people aboard the ferry saw his lights and began pointing, more people running around the decks to gather on the nearest side, the starboard side, of the ship.

They began yelling at him.

Gurevenich’s English was not good, but he could distinguish some of the words, epithets.

“Bastards…planet-rapers…motherfuckers…pigs … assholes…”

Some of the people yelled in languages he could not fathom. Perhaps Oriental.

“What is it? What are they saying, Captain?”

“I believe they do not like us, Lieutenant Mostovets.”

“What? Why is that, Captain?”

Gurevenich knew the reasons, but he was forbidden to tell even his officers.

The ferry’s propellers went into reverse, and it began to back slowly in a wide circle, bringing the bow abeam of the submarine.

Around them, other watercraft, ranging from small cruisers to fishing trawlers and tramp freighters, began to converge on the Winter Storm,

“What are they doing?” Mostovets asked, his alarm clear in his voice. “They would not ram us?”

In a hundred million years, Gurevenich would not have even considered that possibility.

Now, he was not so certain.