Ultra Deep

Chapter Fifteen

“Hey, boss, sorry to get you out of bed,” Jack Evoy said, not sounding sorry at all. Probably because his sleep had not come in a series of continuous eight-hour chunks in the past week, either.

“What’s a bed?” Unruh asked him.

“Call my wife. She knows what an empty one is. Look, Carl, we had JPL,ˮ — the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena — “move a KH-11 into stationary orbit over the Pacific yesterday so that we’d have constant surveillance.”

“I believe you,” Unruh said, sitting up on the side of the cot which threatened to tip over, trying to rub his eyes with one hand and spot his cigarettes on the desktop at the same time. He gave up on his eyes and reached for the crumpled package. It was empty.

He was planning on quitting, anyway.

“So,” Evoy went on, “we’ve been monitoring on infrared tonight.”

“I believe that, too.”

“We’ve got ships on the move.”

“What? Whose ships?”

“Commonwealth. Kirov and Kynda and their escorts. The sonobuoys tell us the Winter Storm has also dropped her search pattern and changed course. They’re all making top speed.”

“Shit. Have you got headings on them?”

“Yup, boss, we do. They’re going to visit the Ol’yantsev, which happens to be outside of, south of, our target area”

“Analysis?”

“Their submersible has found it. Or found something. Well know more in a little while.”

“Good, Jack. In fact, great.” Unruh stood up, stifling a yawn.

“You going to promote me?”

“No, but I may buy you dinner.”

“It’s going to have to be one damned good dinner.”

“Keep me posted. HI call the boys in the Pacific and get it up on the plotting boards.”

The Bronstein was making full turns, headed back into the impact zone.

They had met a task force, one coming out of Hawaii, Wilson Overton assumed. An aircraft carrier, a cruiser, a bunch of destroyers, and some other types. A seagoing tug had taken over the tow of the Los Angeles, and the frigate had immediately turned around and started back, moving out ahead of the task force, leaving it behind.

Overton was glad of it. He had begun to feel stranded, aboard a ship that was going to be where the action, and the story, was not.

He was on the bridge, sitting on his stool at the back, trying to be unobtrusive, and staying out of everyone’s way. Every time he stood up, or went to take a leak, the naval types gave him reproachful looks.

He could see the log readout and knew the ship was making twenty-five knots. It rose and fell with a reassuring rhythm in seas that would be frightening from lower down, from the main deck. Occasionally, a wave crashed over the bow, white water roiling down the length of it. It had started to rain an hour before, and visibility would probably be less than a quarter-mile in daylight. Big windshield wipers slapped away on the windows, almost hypnotizing.

It was almost daylight, or seemed like it. Two big searchlights were on and aimed at angles off the bow. Every once in a while, Overton saw a small boat, just a flash of white hull, as the frigate passed them. Most of the ships that had been massed at the supposed impact point had scattered when the research vessels began their search patterns. Overton felt some responsibility, some might say culpability, in regard to the civilian boats. He remembered Carl Unruh asking him not to publish the coordinates.

But he had. And fifty rather idiotic skippers had gathered at 26°20′ North, 176°10′ East. Only the lack of detail relative to the precise seconds had kept them away from the actual point of impact.

But he had been listening to the scanners, had heard of the near collisions, the shouts to get out of the way, as the civilians clustered around the search vessels. It was probably the reason the officers on the bridge bestowed such silent loathing upon him.

He had also overheard conversations between the bridge and the combat information center and understood that a lot of the smaller boats had left the area as the weather worsened, headed for Midway Island, which relieved him to some degree. Still, there were around twenty-five larger ships cruising somewhat aimlessly around the impact zone.

Overton had thought that, being aboard the Navy ship, he would be in the thick of the action, but had come to feel isolated. He did not know what was happening in the rest of the world. If the frigate was getting information about riots and protests in capital and Pacific Coast cities, no one was passing it on to him.

As he sat on his stool and watched the angry seas in the searchlights and reappreciated Joseph Conrad, a bobbing yacht appeared on the left side, sliding into the flood of light from the frigate.

Giant lettering plastered the hull.

It was not foundering, but it looked a little sick, fighting its way up the steep slopes of waves. The flying bridge was cornpletely wrapped in canvas and clear vinyl, and the foredeck seemed to be constantly awash.

Overton stood up and turned back to the communications compartment.

The ensign on duty saw him and said, “Can I help you, Mr. Overton?”

“Therms an Ocean Free boat out there. Can you raise him on the radio?”

The ensign looked around at the consoles manned by his technicians, selected one, and said, “Come on over here, Mr. Overton.”

After attempting several different marine frequencies, the operator contacted a sleepy-sounding Curtis Aaron, then passed the microphone to Overton.

After Overton identified himself, Aaron did not sound as sleepy.

“Are you on that Navy ship, Mr. Overton?”

“Yes, I am, Mr. Aaron.”

“You in contact with your paper?”

“That’s right. What is Ocean Free doing here?” Overton asked, flipping pages in his notebook to a blank page. He headed it with the date and time.

“Representing the people.”

“I see. And what do the people say about all of this?”

He listened to some ranting about Vietnam and Washington forests and interference with Lady Destiny.

“Is that a departure from your usual position?” Overton asked.

“Departure? What departure?” Perhaps because the yacht was so close, Aaron’s voice sounded very clear over the radio. The deep, resonant voice carried the tone of hurt feelings.

“As I recall, you normally have been concerned with mankind’s disruption of nature. What does destiny have to do with this?”

“Nature and destiny are very much allied,” Aaron said, but he sounded unsure of himself.

“You’re saying that the reactor should stay where it is, on the bottom of the Pacific?”

“Have you ever heard of predestination, Mr. Overton?”

“This is foreordained?”

“Every man must follow his own precepts.”

“Look, Mr. Aaron, can I get a direct quote from you? What do we do with the reactor?”

“You’ve got your story,” Aaron said and signed off.

Leaving Overton with the disturbing thought that he had pushed a confused man in the wrong direction.

Avery Hampstead called his sister.

“Do you know what the hell time it is, Avery? The sun’s not up.”

“Yes, it is, Adrienne. You Manhattan people just can’t see it until it’s direcdy overhead.”

“Call me back when it is.”

“Actually, I wanted to call you earlier, but I decided to wait until a decent hour for you.”

She sighed theatrically and asked, “Your decent and my decent are two different concepts. What time is it there?”

“Almost twelve-thirty.”

“So this is important?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “I need to know something.”

“From me?”

“Yes, my dear.”

“Shoot.”

Hampstead cleared his throat and said, “You make an awful lot of money from people shelling out their hard-earned bucks to see something of a, for want of a well-thought-out word, sleazy program.”

“Sleazy! I wouldn’t call it sleazy!”

“You have a better vocabulary than I do, Adrienne.”

“My matches are not sleazy!”

“What are they?” Hampstead asked.

“They’re what people want them to be.”

“True championships?”

“Entertainment. That’s what people pay for, Avery. Entertainment.”

“And you don’t feel” — he almost said “disgust” — “badly about taking their money?”

“What’s this all about, Avery?”

“I just want to know how you feel about your work.”

“Do I sleep at night, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Ahhh. This relates to you, does it?”

“Yes, my dear, it does.”

“I sleep exceptionally well at night, brother of mine. I’m true to me. People are going to pay for what they want, anyway, and I simply provide them with what they want. I’m not making any moral or ethical choices. They’ve already been made.”

“Thank you, dear. That was helpful.”

After he hung up, he was not certain how helpful. Hampstead got up from the chair he had come to know well, rounded the end of the table and headed for the corner where four of the nuclear experts were gathered.

He pulled out a spare chair and sat down.

Harlan Ackerman said, “Avery?”

“Straight up, Harlan. Is the reactor supercritical?” Ackerman glanced at Henrique d’Artilan, the man from the International Atomic Energy Agency, then said, “Right now?”

“Right now.”

“It’s possible, Avery. If they in fact used the same switching circuitry on the Four as they did on Topaz Two, it’s likely.”

“Just because of that damned switch?”

“Yes. It’s really an integrated circuit, accepting signals from different sensors. If it senses catastrophe, it’s supposed to shut down the reactor.”

“But it’s wired wrong?”

“Yes.”

“And our people are at risk?”

“More people will be at risk if we don’t go ahead with the recovery”

“Shouldn’t Brande and his people be allowed to make their own decision?”

Ackerman did not answer.

Hampstead turned to the Frenchman, but he was not going to answer, either.

“Have you been watching the plot, Avery?” Ackerman asked.

Hampstead turned to look up at the display.

“The Soviet ships are converging,” he said.

“Exactly. We think they’ve got it pinpointed,” Ackerman said.

“And we don’t want to clog up the process just now, do we?” d’Artilan asked.

When the starboard weight did not drop, there had been a supreme moment of panic, when the adrenaline hit top pumping limits.

Brande had felt it the second the LED did not go green, and the red LED began flashing. Involuntarily, he stopped breathing. His forearm tightened up on him, and he looked down to see Connie Alvarez-Sorenson’s tiny hand gripping it. Her face was pale.

“What … what happened?” she asked.

“Nothing, I’m afraid,” Brande told her.

The interior of the pressure hull felt a great deal colder than it was.

Brande tried the emergency release switch, but the LED kept flashing, and the weight did not release.

Behind him, Kim Otsuka let her breath go in a long ragged sigh. Then she said, “Atlas?”

“I think so,” Brande said. “Connie, let’s you and me change places.”

She was tiny, and that helped as Brande let her slide across his lap, then settled himself into the right seat.

Otsuka called the surface. “Who’s on? Okey?”

“Got me, beautiful. We talking dinner? A movie? Something wonderful?”

“We’ve got a problem.”

Dokey’s tone did not change. He stayed calm, almost bored. “Tell me about, would you? Environmental systems?”

“They’re fine, Okey. One of the weights is hung up.”

As Otsuka reported on each of the monitoring systems, Brande activated the control panel in front of him, fed power to the ROV, and switched on the robot’s video camera and lights. He put Atlas’s view on the starboard screen.

He saw a waterscape of nothing that faded into darkness. Gripping the joysticks lightly, he eased the left one forward, and the ROV began moving, slipping out of its sheath, dragging its cable behind. It began to appear in the porthole in front of him.

Dokey’s voice continued to come over the instrument panel speakers, slow and easy. “So you’ve got a blinking LED? Try the emergency drop?”

“Yes,” Otsuka said, “with no luck.”

“Dane going to play with Atlas, now?”

“She’s out of the sheath now, turning to look underneath us.”

“Don’t tire her out, Dane,” Dokey said.

Brande watched the video monitor. A little right stick, and the robot began to turn. A little down, and little forward thrust, and she dove beneath the submersible.

He backed off with the left joystick, to stop forward momentum, and raised the ROV’s nose by pulling back on the right stick. A view of DepthFinderʼs underside appeared. He could see the wire-enclosed sheath and the two concave depressions that extended from bow to stern between three hull ridges. The robot’s bright lights made the hull blindingly white against the blackness of dark water.

Incongruously, he thought of the Crest Girl. Smile.

He saw the empty cavity where the port weight had been, and he saw the starboard weight hanging partly out of its cavity, the back of it down, but the front end lodged in place.

“The cable!” Connie Alvarez-Sorenson yelped.

The tow cable for SARSCAN had been allowed too much slack when he had brought the sub to a stop. It had looped up into the forward release mechanism for the starboard weight.

While he studied the situation, the submersible suddenly lurched and tilted bow down.

“Eek!” Alvarez-Sorenson gulped.

“That’s just SARSCAN dropping to the end of its tether,” Otsuka reassured her.

“I don’t know if I want to expand my horizons any further,” Alvarez-Sorenson said.

“Sure you do,” Brande said. “You’re a natural flyer, Connie.”

“Uh-huh.”

The fiber-optic tow cable went taut as SARSCAN sank, but the short loop was still caught in the release mechanism.

Brande eased in forward power, and Atlas approached the weight. He stopped about four feet away, judging by the screen.

Moved his hands to the manipulator controls.

Using the right stick, he reached out with the manipulator, then stopped it just short of the looped cable. With the slide switches, he opened the claw, then stretched the arm out, then closed the claw gently on the cable.

He sensed that the women had quit breathing. Beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead, despite the chill of the interior.

Moving his left hand back to the ROV stick, he eased in reverse power and tugged gendy at the cable.

The loop tightened, but did not free itself.

More power.

Nothing.

“Please don’t sever the cable, Dane,” Otsuka said. “We don’t want to lose SARSCAN.”

“It’s a tough cable, Kim.”

More power.

Nothing.

Brande brought the controller back to neutral.

“The cabled lodged damned tight,” he said. “The forward edge of the weight has it clamped against the hull cavity.”

Otsuka relayed that report to Dokey.

“Forget the cable, Dane,” Dokey called back, “Concentrate on the weight itself.”

“Good idea,” Brande said, and Otsuka relayed that comment also.

With the manipulator controls, Brande released the ROV’s grip on the cable, and pulled the arm back.

He maneuvered Atlas downward, then nosed up to vertical, and pressed the manipulator arm against the rear of the hanging weight. In the peripheral view of the camera’s eye, he could still see the small loop of cable hanging from the front release.

Using the left joystick, Brande started easing in forward power.

The robot surged, pushed, seemed to grunt against the weight.

Shoved in full power.

The weight jiggled from side to side, rose a fraction, and jiggled some more.

The robot arm started slipping sideways, sliding off the weight.

A little left with the right stick.

The weight rose another fraction.

The loop of cable slowly sank from the crevice between weight and hull.

Brande backed off on the power, went to reverse, and the ROV scooted out of the way just as the weight came loose and dropped in slow motion out of the camera’s vision.

The submersible began to rise.

Otsuka said, “Very nice, Dane.”

“Damn,” Alvarez-Sorenson said, “we’re going home.”

“Sure,” Brande told her, “and you get to drive. It’s about a three-hour trip”

Now, eight hours later, DepthFinder was back on the bottom. During the crew and battery pack changeover, they had replaced SARSCAN’s fiber-optic tow cable, just to be on the safe side. Rather than switch to Sneaky Pete, Dokey had opted to use Atlas for the visual search, in addition to the sonar. The larger ROV used electrical power at a faster rate than Sneaky, but Dokey did not want to waste time on the surface making the switch.

Within forty minutes of Brande, Otsuka, and Alvarez-Sorenson crawling out of the pressure hull, SARSCAN had been lowered back into a sea that seemed enraged, followed by the submersible.

Rae Thomas was at the controls of the sub, Dokey was in the right seat, Bob Mayberry was in the back, and Brande was in the lab, hovering over the operations desk, worried.

He had not worried much before.

Not since the tragedy with Janelle.

Brande knew that his emphasis on safety arose out of the simple accident that had killed Janelle. He and his engineers triple-checked, then triple-checked again, every design and every procedure.

He was not worried about DepthFinder; Atlas, or SARSCAN.

Maynard Dokey and Bob Mayberry had over 4,000 dives between them.

Rae Thomas had probably dived over a thousand times in submersibles.

But he was worried about her.

Sitting there between Paco Sanchez at the acoustic telephone and Larry Emry with his search monitor, Brande was dimly aware of the beating of rain against the superstructure and the groan of the diesels as they struggled to maintain position in the worsening seas.

His eyes were focused on the bulkhead above the workbench, and he was seeing pale blue eyes laughing with him, platinum hair spread against the pillow, remembering his fingers on velvety flesh, the soft cushion of her lips, the pulse of her throat, the heat in her cheeks. He loved the way she talked back to him, spoke her mind.

Slugging himself mentally, Brande cursed his inability to stay away from her. This was precisely why he had passed his own law to remain aloof from his employees.

…do you think you could love me, Dane?

I’m trying my best.

I’m being serious, damn it.

Rae…

I love you.

And with the firm lips smiling at him from his own shadow and the light blue eyes studying him from the bulkhead above the workbench, Brande kept thinking of the thousands of tons of pressure being exerted on the hull of the sub.

Threatening.

“Dane?”

He shook his head.

“Dane?”

He looked up at Polodka. “Yes, Svetlana?”

“There is a telephone call for you.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

Brande grabbed the receiver from the set on the workbench.

“Yeah?”

“Dane, this is Avery”

Glancing up at the logging monitor, Brande noted that the submersible was at 18,650 feet of depth. Forward speed ten knots. All systems green.

“Yeah, Avery, what’s up?”

“We’re pretty certain the Sea Lion has located the rocket.”

“What!”

“The CIS ships are currently clustered at twenty-six, nineteen, fifty-nine North, one-seventy-six, ten, thirty-three East.”

Brande spun around in his chair to look at Larry Emr/s monitor.

“That’s outside our search area.”

“Yes, just a trifle,” Hampstead said.

“Shit. We’re on our way.”

“Hold on. I need to talk to you a minute.”

“You hold on,” Brande told him. “Larry!”

Emry looked up from his keyboard.

Brande repeated the new coordinates to him. “Set up a secondary search zone. Pass the word to Rae and Mel, and change course.”

“Well head over there without bringing them up?”

“Right. It’s only what, three miles?”

“About that,” Emry said, grabbing a phone and hitting the intercom buttons for the bridge. “Okay, Chief, we’re executing now.”

Brande turned his attention back to Hampstead. “The Russians reported the find?”

“No. Washington has been interpreting the movement of ships.”

“Christ! Why can’t those people just talk to us?”

“Someday, Dane, we may figure that out. Right now, it looks like they’re onto something.”

“We’re going over there”

“Good,” Hampstead said.

“What about the Eastern Flower? Have you talked to her yet?”

“The Kane reports that her robots are still inoperative. They’re working on them. Cartwright’s en route to the new area, too.”

“Hell, we gave them the programs.”

“They’re having trouble adapting them. They’ve requested Otsuka again.”

Brande wondered if Otsuka had not altered the program a tad before transmitting it to the Japanese ship. Nah… “Anyway, Avery, you had something else to tell me?”

After a long pause, Haunpstead said, “I talked to my sister.” What the hell? “And?”

“She said I should be true to myself.”

“Nice sister.”

“I think so. I’m going to introduce her to Kaylene”

“Avery?”

“I’m probably breaking laws I never heard of, Dame. The reactor is hot.”

Brande put the phone down, but not on its cradle. He thought about Rae down there. And Okey and Bob.

He lifted the receiver and pressed it to his ear hard, as if it would help him hear something different when he asked, “You’re sure?”

Hampstead told him what he knew of the CIS modeling program.

“Between six o’clock last night and midnight tonight?”

“Yes, Dane. I’m sorry.”

“Who’s the sorry son of a bitch that made the decision to not tell us?”

“There’s a bunch of them”

“Who’s your contact? The Unruh guy?”

“Yes.”

“And where is he?”

“The Situation Room.”

“You happen to have a phone number, Avery?”

Hampstead gave it to him.

Cutting the connection, Brande reopened it and told Bucky Sanders, who was on duty in the radio shack, to get the Washington number and ask for Unruh.

“And Bucky, I want this piped into the ship’s PA system and over the acoustic phone.”

“Gotcha, Chief.”

The way Paco Sanchez and Larry Emry were staring at him, Brande realized that his voice had climbed a few octaves as he talked to Hampstead.

Others in the lab had gathered closer.

“Let me talk to Mayberry, Paco,” he said, taking the acoustic telephone.

“Bob, you there?”

“All bright and happy, Dane. Larry says we’ve got our target spotted.”

“Yeah, we do. In a minute, Bob, you’ll be hearing a heated conversation. Listen carefully, then well talk.”

“Okay,” Mayberry said, but his tone was dubious.

The phone rang.

Brande picked it up.

“Dr. Brande? Carl Unruh here”

“Are you there with all the people who make decisions, Unruh?”

“Uh, yeah. Something the matter?”

“Tell me about the state of the reactor,” Brande said.

“Well, you probably know as much…”

“What happens at 2400 hours tonight?”

The hesitation lasted six or seven heartbeats. “Ah, shit. Avery caved in?”

“In fact, Unruh, the damned thing could already be supercritical, right?”

“Uh, yeah, that’s right, but listen, Brande…”

“You’d better dig a hole wherever it is spooks dig holes because, when this is over, I’m coming looking…”

“Hey, Brande! Think about the goddamned world for…”

“Just like fucking ‘High Noon.’”

Brande slammed the phone down. His face felt hot, flushed with the heat of his anger.

He grabbed the desk mike and the acoustic telephone and used them both simultaneously.

“Everybody heard that?”

There was no answer. Despite the pounding of the rain and the whine of the diesel engines, the ship seemed unnaturally quiet.

“Rae, prepare for ascent.”

“Do we know for certain guaran-goddamn-teed that the thing has gone to meltdown?” Dokey asked.

Brande hesitated. “No. What we know is what the CIS modeling program said.”

“Which is? Tell me, Chief.”

“It could have happened as early as last night. On the back end, they’re saying midnight tonight.”

“The max is 2400 hours?” Emry asked from beside him. “Right.”

“Anybody want to take a vote now?” Thomas said over the phone.

“No damned vote this time,” Brande said. “We’re turning back”

“Because you’re pissed as some flaky bureaucrat?” she asked. “Or because you don’t think we can do it?”

Brande tried to calm down. Rae was right; he was mad as hell at Unruh and his ilk. One does not make decisions based on incomplete information, and he felt betrayed by those he had trusted to give him the right data.

“Come on, Chief,” she urged.

Brande took a slow, deep breath. “You’ve got the gavel, Rae.”

“I forgot,” she said. “All right, new deadline, 2300 hours tonight. All the yeas be quiet. If there’s a nay in the bunch, shout it out so I can hear you over the phone. One nay is all it takes to turn one-eighty.”

The silence of the ship continued to overwhelm.

Overwhelmed Brande, at any rate.

He grabbed the phone, “Bucky, get hold of the Olʼyantsev. I want to talk to whoever’s in charge.”

“You know who that is, Chief?”

“Some goddamned general. Just get him.”

Dmitri Oberstev was in the combat information center when the radio call came in.

“I don’t wish to talk to anyone just now,” he said, keeping his eyes on the plotting board.

“Oh, General,” Talebov said, “this man threatens to ram my ship if he doesn’t talk to you.”

Oberstev took off his glasses and polished them, studying Captain Talebov. He appeared too earnest.

“Very well.”

He got up from his chair and crossed to a console, taking the headset of the man sitting there.

“This is General Oberstev”

“My name is Dane Brande, General, and I’m one mad son of a bitch.”

“Brande?”

He looked to Talebov, who said, “The American vessel Orion.ˮ

“Yes, Mr. Brande. We ought to have thanked you for your chart…”

“Are you really the head honcho?”

“What?”

“Are you calling the shots, Oberstev?”

He finally got a grasp on the idiom. “Yes.”

“Well, I’m tired of the goddamned games being played in Moscow and Washington,” Brande told him. “Do you want that bastard off the bottom or not?”

Oberstev expelled his breath in the same amount of time it took him to make his decision. “I want it up, yes.”

“Is it hot?”

“Hot?”

“Is it supercritical?”

Oberstev mulled over the question. An easy question, a difficult answer.

This decision was made. To hell with Vladivostok.

“It may be, Mr. Brande.”

“Traitor!” yelped Janos Sodur.

“Just a minute, Mr. Brande.” Oberstev turned around until he found Alexi Cherbykov. “Colonel, would you place Colonel Sodur under arrest and confine him to his cabin? I’m sure Captain Talebov will provide a guard.”

“At once, General,” Cherbykov said, grinning his approval.

Leonid Talebov said to the duty officer, “Senior Lieutenant, call the master-at-arms.”

Sodur made violent protests, accusations, and promises as he was led from the combat information center.

“I am back, Mr. Brande.”

“Have you located the rocket, General?”

Oberstev again looked at the plotting board. “I am afraid not. We have found the left booster.” He read off the coordinates.

“That’s it?” Brande asked.

“Also the right booster. It is at five thousand, three hundred and five meters of depth, at coordinates two-six, one-nine, five-seven North, one-seven-six, one-zero, three-one East.”

“That’s great!” Brande said. “It gives us a track to follow.”

“Yes, we think so, too. Pyotr Rastonov has been working on it.”

“In a minute, let’s put him on the air with our Larry Emry and let them work together.”

“Very well,” Oberstev said, “it is a good idea.”

“Now, tell me about that modeling program.”

This Brande seemed very forceful, but Oberstev found himself responding with all he had learned from Piredenko.

“The majority of the individual trials show the rocket taking an abrupt turn to the right immediately after it entered the water?”

“That is correct, Mr. Brande. Apparently, to the computer, the odds are in favor of the rocket’s fins locking into a tight right turn.”

“Damn,” Brande said. “I wish we’d known that sooner.”

“They are only odds,” Oberstev reminded him.

“But they’re all we’ve got to play with,” Brande countered.

And General Oberstev had to agree.

Bent over the radar, her forehead pressed to the hood, Dawn Lengren said, “There’s so many, Curtis. I can’t tell which one is the Orion.”

Aaron was at the helm, fighting to keep the bow aimed into the oncoming waves. The windshield wiper slapped back and forth with irritating regularity, but it did not help much. The rain sluiced off the glass, making forward vision wavery. He had the foredeck spotlight on, but it only showed him one towering wave after another.

It was cold. There was no heater on the flying bridge, and both he and Dawn were wrapped in parkas. Dawn had a blanket over her shoulders also.

Dawn’s stomach did not seem to be affected by the turbulence, as it had been by alcohol, but the rest of his family were all below, sick as dogs. Donny Edgeworth had been heaving his guts for most of the night.

It had not turned out quite as he had envisioned. For some reason, Aaron had expected a calm fleet of boats, all circled around his own as he spoke over a loud hailer. He had foreseen the culmination of his natural ministry. People listening to his logical discourse with awe. The television cameras recording sound bites for the six o’clock, the eleven o’clock, and posterity.

His scripts were scattered around the bridge, wet and smudged.

The reality was mayhem and chaos. There were ships all around, but he could not see them. They zigzagged all over the place. Several times, he had damned nearly run into fishing boats.

According to the radio, there were a lot of Commonwealth and U.S. ships present, but they had only seen the one. Somehow, in fighting the sea, he had lost track of both Brande and Mark Jacobs.

Still, he felt fortunate for the contact with the Navy ship. He knew Wilson Overton’s column, and thought that the reporter would give him a fair shake.

It did not always happen that way. Reporters could be bitchy, especially the television reporters.

And, too, Aaron thought that his conversation with Over-ton had helped to clarify his thinking.

He knew what he must do.

Chapter Sixteen

They had set up their own communications net including the Timofey Olʼyantsev, the Kane, the Bartlett, and the Orion.

And excluding CINCPAC and Washington, after Brande had responded to a radio call from Adm. David Potter.

“What do you want, Admiral?” Brande snapped at the microphone. His rage was taking a long time to dissipate, mainly because he did not want to let go of it.

He was in a chair at the workbench operations center in the laboratory with Larry Emry on his right and Mel Sorenson, who had relieved Polodka, on his left. Most of the ship’s crew and expedition team were present, sitting and standing as close as possible to the sources of information.

Emry was talking on the comm net with Rastonov and Cartwright while Brande listened to Potter.

“Brande, I’m going to put a dive team from the Kane aboard your ship. They’ll crew the next dive of the DepthFinder.”

“Like hell they will.”

“Listen, Brande, you’re a civilian. We’ll let people who are paid for it take the risk.”

“Tell that tale to the assholes in Washington, Admiral. If your people try to board my ship, I’ll shove them back into the sea.”

“Brande…”

Switching off the frequency, Brande picked up the phone.

“Bucky, get me the asshole.”

“Chief?”

“The Unruh guy.”

Emry tapped him on the shoulder. “We’re getting a data transfer from the Russians right now.”

“What data, Larry?”

“All of the modeling scenarios.”

“We can handle it with these machines?”

“No,” Emry said. “They’re dumping directly to the mainframe in San Diego. I need to have the satellite channel dedicated to me.”

“I’ve got one call to make, Larry, then it’s all yours.”

A minute later, the phone rang.

“Brande? This is Carl Unruh.”

“Did you dig that hole yet?”

“Not yet,” Unruh said.

“Forget it for now. Do you carry a lot of weight, Unruh?”

“Physically, yes. Politically, maybe.”

“I want you to get on someone’s case and round up as many radiation protection suits as you can find in Hawaii. Put them on an airplane and airdrop them to us.”

“Nothing’s flying low in that weather you’ve got, Brande. It’s too damned risky.”

“There’s a couple hundred people taking a risk here, Unruh. What’s one more?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Brande hung up and shoved the handset toward Emry. “The channel’s all yours, Larry.”

He checked the status of the DepthFinder on the monitor — it was 17,000 feet down with battery charges near the halfway point and all other systems in the green — then looked back to Emry’s video screen. The exploration director had narrowed the focus to an area south of the original search zone. The coordinates of the two boosters were marked with small circles, and the positions of the Sea Lion and the DepthFinder were indicated with tiny squares. The CIS sub was tinted red and the MVU submersible was yellow, naturally.

Lifting the phone from in front of Sorenson, Brande lodged it between his shoulder and his ear. “Bob, you free?”

“Hell, no, Chief. I cost money” Mayberry seemed surprisingly at ease despite not knowing whether or not he was being subjected to unplanned radiation therapy.

“What’s the situation?”

“Okey’s got Atlas out, snooping around the booster. I don’t know how they know it’s the left one, but probably by the lettering on the side. Maybe the Cyrillic lettering says ‘left side, people.’ We’re getting tremendous pictures.”

Mayberry sounded like the typical oceanographer, ecstatic with a new discovery.

Brande wished he could see the video.

“What kind of condition is it in, Bob?”

“It’s sunken a few inches into the bottom muck, and the nose is aimed to the northeast, so it must have tumbled after it broke loose. I’m guessing it was hot when it hit the cold water because the skin is buckled pretty badly. Other than that, and knowing I’ve never seen a booster rocket this close before, I think it’s a complete unit.”

Ingrid Roskens, listening to their conversation over the speaker, leaned over Brande. “Ask him when he thinks it was severed from the main rocket.”

Brande repeated the question.

“Damn,” Mayberry said. “Not from hitting the bottom, for sure. I’d guess they parted ways at impact, or shortly thereafter. The boosters don’t have fins, nothing to improve the glide.”

“And it still traveled over five miles from the point of impact. I wish I could see it,” Roskens said.

“Go get Valeri,” Brande said. “Have him talk to Rastonov and see if we can’t borrow, buy, or rent a pair of their Loudspeaker transceivers.”

“Done,” she said.

“Bob, what are you doing now?” Brande asked on the phone.

“We’re drifting over to take a look at the second booster. By then, the people on the surface should have a new search plan for us.”

“We’re working on it. Watch out for the Sea Lion. She’s southeast of the second booster.”

“Gotcha, Dane.”

Brande stood up and stretched. His muscles felt a little bunched up, but he was not tired. He was still too angry for fatigue.

At one point in the night, he had logically considered the position taken by the White House, and logically, he understood it. A few lives were expendable in the short run if they protected a few hundred thousand lives in the long run.

The logic did not matter a whit, however, when the expendables were Brandeʼs friends and colleagues. His anger manifested itself in taut neck muscles and hands that clenched into fists every now and then.

Again, he checked the status board of the submersible. The image of Rae at the controls never left his mind.

The DepthFinder did not have radiation measuring equipment, but the Sea Lion did, and Rastonov had told them that nothing above normal radiation levels had yet been encountered by the Commonwealth submersible.

That was the only reason Rae was still on the bottom.

“Take a break, Dane. I’ll sit in for a while,” Otsuka told him.

“Iʼm all right, Kim.”

“You are, now. What about later?”

Brande shrugged, then went forward to the wardroom and got himself a cup of coffee. He carried it to a forward porthole and tried to read the ocean.

The sea was difficult to read because of the hard pellets of rain pelting the glass. Fourteen-or fifteen-foot waves, he guessed, running from the northwest, forcing them to stay bow-on in the same direction. To the west were the lights of a large ship, probably one of the CIS warships. North, he saw the lights of another ship, and he thought it might be the Kane. He could not see any other lights, but knew there were ships around. Their own radar had recorded twenty-two an hour before.

Studying the wave action and thinking about the difficulties they would have in raising the submersible to the deck during the next changeover, he decided to allow more time than planned. Additionally, he thought of some other changes that should be made.

You sonovabitch! she’d say.

It’s for your own good, he’d say.

No, she wouldn’t buy that.

Because I care about you?

You sonovabitch!

Because I love you?

Maybe.

Brande spun around, left the lounge, and strode down the corridor to the lab.

Everyone on board the vessel was now in the laboratory, except, he hoped, Connie Alvarez-Sorenson and one of the helmsmen on the bridge. There was a low level of chatter, but tensions seemed to be on the rise.

He pressed through the crowd and squatted next to Emry’s chair. On the screen now were two dotted lines connecting the impact point on the surface with the identified sites of the boosters on the bottom. Emry was experimenting with another dotted line, curving it from the impact point to various spots on the sea floor.

The Orion rose and fell with a fairly steady rhythm. People crossed the deck with strange syncopation.

“Got something, Larry?”

“Maybe. Over sixty percent of the scenarios run by Piredenko’s model show the A2 hitting the surface and jamming the guidance fins into a right turn. If the boosters peel off as a result of impact and heat stress as it’s going down, and land where they are now, then the main rocket — first, second, and payload stages, with the fins still forcing the turn — probably curves back a hell of a lot farther west than we anticipated that it would.”

“If it didn’t rotate,” Brande said, playing devil’s advocate.

“Wouldn’t do it, not without two of the fins moving to opposing positions,” Emry countered. “I don’t think it rolled, since the left booster is down on the left of the path, and the right booster is on the right. If it were rotating on the way down, the booster positions could have been reversed.”

“I give you fifty-fifty on that.”

“Appreciate your confidence.”

“Are we narrowing the possibilities?” Brande asked. “Damned sure. I just told Rae and Dokey to head south and track a little more to the west, along the twenty-eight second line. Drozdov is also headed south, along the thirty-second line. Cartwright approved.”

“Good man.” Brande stood up, feeling the fuzzy anticipation of discovery. He had felt it before.

He leaned over the bench and pulled the communication net microphone close. Pressing the transmit switch, he said, “This is Dane Brande. Who’s on the net?”

“John Cartwright here.”

“Pyotr Rastonov.”

“Pyotr, is General Oberstev handy?”

After a second, he heard, “This is Dmitri Oberstev.”

“General Oberstev, Captain Cartwright, do we know what shipping we have in the immediate vicinity?”

“Cartwright, here. We’ve got them all on our plot. There’s too damned many, from my point of view.”

“I think we need to get them out of here. What I’d like to see, if it’s possible, is a cordon around the Ol’yantsev and the Orion. Use the Commonwealth warships and whatever U.S. ships are available.”

“I believe that would be possible,” the general said.

“I’m not sure what’s going to move the civilians,” Cartwright said.

“Warn them of imminent radiation danger,” Brande suggested. “It’s not that farfetched, unfortunately.”

“We’ll try it. There’s only two who might not respond. One’s a yacht with a bunch of reporters on it, and the other is the Eastern Flower. She reports that she’s now ready to help in the recovery.”

“Not with an untested submersible and robot,” Brande said. “We don’t want to divert our time to another rescue.”

“You’d ban them?”

“Damned right.”

“Consider them banned.”

Oberstev said, “Our submarines are on standby. Perhaps they could, what do you say? nudge the smaller boats on their way.”

“Damned good idea, General. We’ll put the subs on traffic duty.”

“I’ll have to get CINCPAC’s permission for that,” Cartwright said.

“Not if you want the job done,” Brande told him.

“I can always get it later.”

The three of them agreed on stations in a large circle for the CIS warships, the Bronstein, the Kane, the Bartlett, and the Antelope. As the search moved south, if it did, the circle of protection would move with it, keeping the civilians from interfering in the recovery operations.

An hour later, Brande was back in his chair at the workbench when Rae reported in.

“Who’s there?”

“This is lover-boy, darlin’.”

“Hey, Mel, we’ve got a sonar return on a target to the east of us. We’re turning off course to investigate. How about you, Gennadi? Can you hear me?”

The two submersibles had been communicating infrequently on the acoustic telephone, and Drozdov responded from the Sea Lion. “I hear you, Miss Kaylene. What is the coordinate of your return?”

“Nineteen, fifty-three, ten, thirty-one, Gennadi.”

“We show only the outline of a large ridge,” Drozdov told her.

Brande looked up at the search monitor and pictured the bottom mentally. The DepthFinder was a half-mile farther south than the CIS sub, and three-fourths of a mile to its west. SARSCAN had picked up a return to its east side which was probably blocked from the Seeker’s sonar probes by the ridge.

Something there.

Hiding.

“What’s your depth, darlin’?”

“Twenty thousand-two, Mel. But Okey says we’re on the brink of a trench.”

“It goes deeper?” Sorenson asked, with some degree of awe in his voice.

“Okey says, ‘count on it.’”

Twelve minutes later, Dokey’s voice sounded on the speakers. “Depth two-zero-eight-five-four. Position one-nine, five- three North, one-zero, three one East.”

Sorenson yelped, “You’ve got it!”

“Shit, no! What we’ve got looks like the first stage. No second stage, no payload stage.”

There was a long collective sigh from the people behind Brande.

The Orion rocked hard to the right, making everyone scramble for balance.

Dokey said, “That son of a bitch is in the canyon, for sure.”

Through the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ben Dele-court, the President had ordered CINCPAC to leave the searchers in the Pacific alone.

Adm. David Potter had complained about a breakdown in the chain of command.

The President said, “I don’t give a damn who’s calling the shots, as long as they’re called. Let the people on the scene share command”

Carl Unruh thought it was as good a system as any other. At least, Brande had discovered some way to get the Russians to cooperate.

Other than for that little bit of drama, nothing else was going on. The major players were on the scene in the Situation Room, but they were not saying much. The whole mood was somber and defeatist as the final deadline approached.

Others were optimistic. According to the placards on the easels, the zealous nature of protests and rallies had died away as soon as word got out that the boosters had been found. Some had been canceled, others had waned for lack of interest.

The display on the electronic board in the Situation Room was now the same as one being generated by someone named Emry on board the Orion. It was being transmitted from Brande’s ship through the RVKane to the CRITICOM satellite network, then picked up by Hawaii and Washington.

Three pieces of debris. Two boosters and the first stage were shown.

A curving dotted line showed the beginnings of a flight

path and three more lines breaking off the first indicated where the boosters and the first stage might have separated from the main body of the A2e.

Where the dotted line would end was still open to conjecture.

But they were getting there.

He kept watching the clock on the wall that was labeled Japan, but which had been reset to keep track of time in the target zone.

There was not much time left on it.

A decade before, when Unruh was part of the operations directorate, he had relished action. Always doing something, going somewhere. He thought that maybe Brande was somewhat like the younger Unruh.

But he was older now. He sat in rooms like this and waited for the actions to take place around him. It seemed like he did not have much control, but he did. He was part of the process that formed the general shape of the actions that would take place. And, distasteful or not, he was good at it.

He did not think Brande would understand or appreciate that.

Earlier, after Brande had chewed him out so thoroughly, Unruh had thought about looking Brande up after it was ail over and trying to explain the process.

Now, he did not think that he would.

He looked up at the clock mislabeled Japan, and he looked at the three pieces of debris that an electronic map said were crunched deep in the Pacific Ocean.

There was supposedly a canyon out there, deeper than deep.

And not enough time.

Unruh did not think he would ever meet Dane Brande, and he thought that that was going to be his loss.

The Orion was directly above the resting place of the A2eʼs first stage. A hundred yards off her bow, the Timofey Olʼyantsev was fighting to stay on station. Though the Commonwealth patrol ship, at 312 feet, was seventy-two feet longer than the research vessel, she did not have the stabilization of the cycloidal propellers.

When Brande visited the bridge to check on Connie Alvarez-Sorenson, she pointed out a yacht, dimly seen through the slanting rain, half a mile to the south. “Cartwright says that thing’s loaded to the gunwales with reporters. They won’t leave us alone. On the radio, the Navy’s trying to get them outside the cordon.”

“Be a shame if we lost them all, wouldn’t it?” Brande said. “I’ll plead the Fifth,” she said.

“You doing all right up here?”

“Just dandy, thanks to computers and satellites. We’re not going anywhere we don’t want to go.”

Brande moved to the right side of the bridge and stared forward through the water sluicing off the windshield.

Dismal, gray view.

Kenji Nagasaka stood near the helm, ready to grab if the autopilot let go.

Alvarez-Sorenson, wrapped in a bulky ski sweater, came over and stood beside him.

“Worried about her?”

“What?”

“Kaylene.”

“Of course not.”

“Bullshit, boss. Shows all over you.”

“You’re the resident expert, Connie?”

“Might as well be expert at something. Go ahead and bring them up.”

“Little early, yet,” Brande said.

“Hey, I’m the acting captain, right? I say, with that weather out there, we need more time.”

Brande went back to the radio shack and said, “Bucky, hook in with the acoustic, would you?”

Sanders flipped toggles and handed him the phone.

“How you doing down there, Bob?”

“We just reported. Check the screen.”

Mayberry was a little testier now, with some fatigue setting in.

“I’m not near the screen.”

“Sorry. Situation the same. We’ve prowled the edge of the canyon, peeked over it a few times. Nothing.”

“The Sea Lion? You check with them on radiation?”

“Thirty minutes ago. No radiation count to speak of. They’re on ascent now, to change crews.”

“That’s what I want you to do, too. Bring it on up.”

There was a delay while Rae wrestled the phone away from Mayberry. Brande pictured it that way.

“Not yet, Dane. We’ve still got a couple hours of shift yet.”

“Now, Rae. Connie wants more time for lift-out. And I want time to install Celebes.”

“Damn it, I was just getting comfortable. Why Gargantua?”

“So we’re ready, just in case. With time the way it is, we’ll have to make do with the submersible’s sonar.”

“All right. Let it be recorded that that’s an unwilling ‘all right’.”

“So recorded.”

He waited with the phone in hand until he heard that the weights had been successfully jettisoned, then went below to manage a final inspection of Gargantua.

He had over three hours to wait, but standing idle was not working for him.

“Everybody below is sick as a dog, Curtis. Don’t you think we should head for Midway?”

“This’ll pass over, Dawn,” Aaron told her. Besides, he was not sure he could find Midway.

When he had last talked to Mark Jacobs, earlier in the morning, Jacobs had told him that he was taking the Greenpeace boat to Midway. Aaron might have followed then, if he had known where the Arienne was.

The radar screen was just a lot of little dots appearing behind the sweep as it rotated. Some dots were brighter than others, but it was difficult to pick out which were true vessels and which were random feedback from the sea.

He had given Dawn a new heading after deciding that a circle of brighter blips was too uniform to be anything other than ships.

The trouble was, somehow they had drifted southwest of the main body of ships, and heading back to it, they were taking the swells off the left rear quarter. Not infrequently, huge waves crashed over the stern, swamping the deck.

A few more minutes, they would reach the circle of ships and could turn back to facing the waves.

Damn, if the weather had not turned so crappy, he could be in the center of those ships, spreading the word.

The closer they got, the brighter the blips looked.

Aaron sat back away from the radar hood and rotated the tension out of his shoulders.

The Queen of Liberty was rocking violently, threatening to heel over. Aaron had to keep a firm grasp on the side of his seat to avoid being spilled onto the deck.

He was mad as hell, trying not to show it to Dawn.

Nothing worked out the way he wanted. The world was going to hell in a handmade basket, and no one wanted to recognize it, to listen to the solutions. These jackasses kept screwing around with it, kept altering it, kept ignoring the signs.

They had to be stopped.

No getting around that.

Jacobs had scooted for Midway Island.

And that left Aaron on his own.

All he could do was his best.

The CIS and U.S. cordon of warships had drifted south and slightly west in anticipation of sending the submersibles into the trench.

Oberstev, partially protected from the hard rain by a gray slicker, stood on the fantail of the Timofey Olʼyantsev and watched the harried activity of the crew as they serviced the Sea Lion.

It was noon, and yet it was dark enough to require floodlights. Pyotr Rastonov scurried about, slipping on the deck, examining connections, antennas, transponders, access doors. He called for more grease for the hatch seal.

A figure clad in yellow rubber pants and shirt exited the superstructure and approached Oberstev.

“I believe I am ready, General Oberstev.”

Gennadi Drozdov was so fatigued, he appeared emaciated. His thin dark hair was plastered to his skull by the rain, and his eyes were sunken holes.

“Are you up to this?” Oberstev asked.

“Yes. Pyotr is correct, General. We must share if we hope to complete the recovery.”

“You are optimistic?”

“Very optimistic.”

Oberstev’s own pessimism had grown. It had taken days to get this far, and they had yet to discover the site of the reactor. He was also leery of what might come out of his unilateral decision to cooperate with the Americans, much less give them access to the Loudspeaker system.

He had no doubts that Chairman Vladimir Yevgeni, and perhaps Admiral Orlov, would take him to task during the subsequent hearings. And there would be hearings; there always were.

He might be relieved of his command of Red Star and forced into retirement.

And yet Red Star and enforced retirement seemed less important now. There was more at stake on his own planet. Why seek Mars when Earth was so close to hand?

“Go then, Gennadi Drozdov, and luck go with you.”

Drozdov nodded, then turned and crossed the deck uneasily, headed for the work party that had set up the breeches buoy. Two men helped the scientist up into it and secured straps over his lap. Then they loaded two medium-size, aluminum, watertight cases onto his lap and strapped them to his body.

With a signal from one of the sailors, the breeches buoy abruptly lifted off the deck, and Gennadi Drozdov went over the railing, sliding toward the sea.

Oberstev almost felt like going with him.

Valeri Dankelov, Svetlana Polodka, Kim Otsuka and Gennadi Drozdov had been working together for over two hours. Robert Mayberry assisted whenever he was called.

Brande kept coming over to check on their progress, and Dankelov would say, “Not yet,” and Mayberry would say “Fuck off, Chief.”

Mayberry was tired.

They were all tired, Dankelov thought. Little mistakes had been made, mistakes that when discovered required subsequent disassembly and reassembly of components.

Installing the physical components had been simple. One of the Loudspeaker transceivers was mounted on the workbench in the laboratory, and the other was cushioned with foam rubber and strapped to the rear seat in the submersible.

Bypassing the existing equipment, the new components had been connected to the hull-mounted transmission and receiving antennas of the research vessel and the submersible. Even tuning the antennas to the new equipment had not been difficult.

One of the drawbacks, of course, was that if one or the other of the CIS systems failed, with the MVU systems disconnected, all communication between the DepthFinder and the Orion or Sea Lion would be cut off.

With the voice subsystem operational, the trying part had been the hard wire and computer-controlled connections between telemetry and video devices and the acoustic transceivers.

Polodka and Otsuka had loaded the Russian software into the computers, then begun the struggle to work out the quirks. It helped that the Russians used an IBM clone programming language, but the conversion was tedious.

Brande came over again, this time bringing a coffeepot and styrofoam mugs. Otsuka was outside, in the submersible, but the others stopped what they were doing to drink.

Brande said, “No matter what, we’re launching at three o’clock.”

Dankelov nodded his acceptance.

Brande walked away and Drozdov looked after him.

“He is a hard taskmaster, Valeri?”

“No, Gennadi, he is not. There is a lot of pressure now, on all of us.”

As they went back to work — the two of them were refitting an integrated circuit in a signal translator box that Mayberry had concocted — Drozdov asked, “Do you like your work in America?”

“Yes, I like it very much.”

“You are a lucky man, Valeri. I envy you.”

“But I miss my home,” Dankelov said. “Perhaps I will return with you.”

“To what?” Drozdov asked. “There is much chaos.”

“But shouldn’t one be working for one’s own country? There is much to be done, and I feel that I am shirking my responsibility, Gennadi.”

“Does Svetlana feel the same?”

“No. She is happy with what she has. She would like to keep it.”

“I once assumed the two of you would marry.”

“It was not to be,” Dankelov said.

“I know you are serious about our profession, Valeri, but you should not be so serious all of the time.”

“It is my nature.”

“Your nature needs revamping,” Drozdov observed.

For fear it would drift in the wind, the Navy had dropped its package without a parachute ten minutes before. The C-141 transport had come in low out of the overcast, its landing lights brightly illuminated, kicked the bright orange box out of a side door, and then disappeared into the cloud cover as quickly as possible.

Thomas did not blame them for not wanting to stick around.

It took the Orion twenty minutes to chase down the floating box, hook it with a line, and raise it from the sea.

Two crewmen hauled it into the laboratory and broke the seals on the aluminum case.

“Two suits? That’s all?” she said.

“That’s all we need,” Brande said.

“Bullshit! You asked for every suit they could find.”

“Maybe Hawaii isn’t a major candidate for radiation contamination,” Brande told her.

She tried to stare him down.

It did not work.

“I’m going on this dive,” she said.

“No. Just Dokey and me.”

Dokey had been sleeping for the last couple of hours, and Otsuka had gone to waken him.

“You sonovabitch! You can’t stop me.”

“You’re tired, Rae. We don’t want accidents.”

“I’m the damned president!”

Everyone in the lab was watching the exchange, some with amusement.

Most with amusement.

“You need a third-seater,” she said.

“The Loudspeaker is using the third seat. Besides, with video transmission, everyone gets to participate.”

“Don’t pamper me.”

Brande reached out, took her shoulders, and pulled her close to him. Bending over, he whispered in her ear, “I’m supposed to, Rae. I love you.”

She pulled her head back to look in his eyes. “Mean it?”

“Sure do?”

“But no pampering, all right?”

“Agreed.”

“Go, then. Get out of here.”

“Is this what’s known as an executive conference?” Dokey asked, coming through the door with Otsuka.

No one answered him.

“I’m glad I’m not an executive.”

Thomas backed away from Brande, reluctantly pulling from the grasp of his hands, and looked at Dokey. He was wearing a sweatshirt over his jumpsuit featuring a boy turtle in a baseball cap and a girl turtle in blond curls. The caption was, I CAN MAKE IT LAST!

“You’ll never be mistaken for one, Okey,” she told him.

Dankelov stepped forward. “I should go, Dane.”

“No, Valeri, you’ve done what you’re supposed to do,” Brande told him.

Ingrid Roskens said, “You’re going to need a structural person when you find it.”

“That’s why we’ve got video transmission, Ingrid. You get your own CRT.”

Everyone had a last comment or suggestion for Brande and Dokey.

It was almost a wake, Thomas thought. As if they did not expect to see him again. She felt like crying. And laughing. Her emotions capsized, then righted themselves, back and forth.

Brande and Dokey dressed in the radiation-protection suits, pants and overblouses, and carried the hoods with them. They were a silvery gray, shiny material, and gave them a spacey appearance.

Emry opened the door to the afterdeck, and crew members began to file out. They wore yellow slickers and hung onto the lifelines that had been stretched over the deck.

Brande and Dokey tromped out in their oversized suits, astronauts headed for the launch complex.

Thomas wanted to run after Dane, throw her arms around him, and drag him back.

The alarm clock was about to ring.

She might not see him again.

She held onto the door jamb, ignoring the rain and spray splashing her, and watched them gingerly climb the scaffold.

Dane was the last one down the hatch, and he gave her a thumbs-up and a wink.

Then he was gone.

They did not even try to lower from the deck with the hatch open. Brande sealed it and dogged it tight, then slipped down into the left seat. It was dark inside, with only the outside light coming through the three portholes.

The thickness of the pressure hull dampened the sound of the storm, but the fury was noticeable in the tilt and bounce of the sub.

“Well, compadre, here we go.”

“You sure you got enough sleep, Okey?”

“I plan to get another couple hours on the descent. That is, if you don’t want to talk about it.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Brand said. “Besides, you’re not sleeping.”

“Damn me, I forgot. Got to fly Gargantua.”

The robot was too large to be attached to DepthFinder, and like SARSCAN, would be towed to the bottom.

Together, they powered up the systems. Brande concentrated on environmental systems first, making sure that pressures and blower speeds were acceptable. Oxygen, lithium oxide.

He felt clumsy in the protection suit. Taking the hood from his lap, he stashed it on the floor under his legs.

Turning awkwardly in his seat, he reached back and turned on the new acoustical system. It had a microphone, rather than a telephone, and he parked the mike between his and Dokey’s seats.

With the propulsion systems checked out, and the sonar and gyros activated, Dokey initiated power for the remote-control panel. When he had green LEDs, he turned on the UHF set and contacted Mel Sorenson on deck.

“Kick his butt overboard, Mel.”

“On the way, Okey.”

A crane operator hoisted the ROV from the deck, swung it out over the side, and lowered it into the tossing sea.

Dokey turned on the video camera, and they saw Gargantua’s view of the surface for a few minutes before he began to sink.

“Okay, Mel, we’ve got greens.”

“Luck,” Sorenson said.

Brande felt the sub rolling backward on her tracks, then the lift from the deck. Because of the rolling deck of the Orion, they started into a pendulum movement, but the arc of the swing was not too great because of the sub’s weight.

There was an elevatorlike sensation of falling, until they hit the sea with an abrupt stop. The crane operator released the hook by remote control.

“Hit reverse, Chief!” Sorenson called.

Brande pulled back hard on the left joystick while leaning forward to look out the porthole. The left catamaran hull was sliding toward him. Or he toward it.

He tugged on the stick, but it was already at the back stop.

The motors whined.

The sub gained momentum, and pulled out of the path of the hull.

She was already sinking, and within moments, the world was darkening, a trade-off for the smooth ride.

Brande brought up the interior lights to dim, then settled back in his seat. Dokey was diddling with his control sticks, putting Gargantua into a steep glide, using as little power as possible.

At 200 feet, Brande tried the Loudspeaker system.

“Anyone there?”

“Right here,” Rae said. Her voice seemed clearer on the Commonwealth acoustic system.

“You want to try a picture?”

“Damn right.”

He activated DepthFinder’s camera, put it on the center screen, and then flipped the toggle switch that Mayberry had jury-rigged to the side of the power panel.

“We’ve got a picture!” Rae said.

“Is it any good?”

“Not too clear, but clear enough. Like a slightly off-tuned TV set.”

“We’ll give you Gargantua.”

Brande slapped the toggle to the off position, then hit a second switch.

“We’ve got that, too.”

“All right, good,” Brande said. “We’re going passive, now.”

They curtailed the power consumption for all of the systems they could in order to reduce the drain on the batteries aboard both the submersible and the robot.

In the next three-and-a-half hours, they talked to Rastonov a couple times — the Sea Lion was already in the canyon at 22,000 feet-no radiation readings — alternately dozed, told some old jokes, and predicted San Diego Chargers outcomes against the Raiders, Broncos, and Seahawks. The projected results were dismal, given the outcome of the first game of the season.

At 900 feet, they lost what daylight the cloud cover had allowed to penetrate.

At 2,000 feet, most of the active sealife disappeared.

Sinking steadily into the abyss at 100 feet per minute.

At 15,000 feet of depth, with the thermostat at full up, it was still cold. Brande wished he had worn a sweatshirt, too.

At 20,000 feet, Brande dumped a little water ballast to slow the descent.

“Dane?” Rae Thomas said.

“Still here.” He gave her an oral report on their status.

“That agrees with what we’re seeing,” she said.

Not all of the monitoring systems had been connected through the Loudspeaker acoustic system, but some data was shown on a separate video display terminal on the operations desk via telemetry. The depth, altitude above ground, heading, inertial navigation readings, battery charges and oxygen supply could be monitored without verbal reports.

Dokey put the sonar waterfall display on the port video screen.

“There’s the canyon rim, Chief. Three hundred yards behind us.”

“I guess we keep going down, then.”

“Until something stops us.”

“Like the Atlantic Ocean?” Brande asked.

Brande used the acoustic microphone. “Pyotr?”

“I am here, Dane.”

“How about some coordinates?”

They did not have the luxury of Emry’s search program on screen, so Brande had to form his own mental pictures. The CIS submersible was nearly a mile west of them and 800 yards south. It had found a slanting bottom at 23,500 feet of depth. The terrain was rugged and steep, and according to Rastonov, looked fragile where they had seen it in their video relay from Seeker.

When the depth readout read 23,675, the altitude indicator kicked in, showing 56 feet.

“Easy up,” Dokey said.

Brande blew off more ballast, and the sub slowed its descent.

“Where’s Gargantua?” Brande asked.

“Two hundred feet in front of us, and about thirty feet lower.”

“Let’s watch the movies.”

They routed power to the cameras and floodlights on both vehicles.

There was nothing to be seen.

“All right, Okey, you do the snooping, and I’ll follow you around.”

“Gotcha.”

Using DepthFinderʼs downward-looking sonar as his guide, Dokey began making wide sweeps to the left and right with Gargantua, moving down toward the slope of the canyon until they had a picture on the starboard VDT.

It was a bleak, dull gray place, a steep slope with rocky outcroppings and what could have once been a lava flow. There was no life that could be seen.

“This is as deep as we’ve ever been,” Brande said.

“Better report it, then.”

“They’re supposed to be able to see it.”

“Yeah, but it’s a new system,” Dokey said.

Brande reported to the surface.

“Is Dokey awake yet?” Rae asked. Trying to be light about it, Brande was sure.

“I’ll pinch him in a minute and find out.”

Emry broke in, “Dane, why don’t you head out west for a bit?”

“You think so, Larry? That would be a hell of a curve for the rocket to take.”

“I’m the one who said it didn’t rotate. You gave me fifty-fifty on that, remember?”

“Heading west”

Dokey put Gargantua into a long, sweeping curve, and Brande followed along.

The bottom dipped away, disappearing from the robot’s camera.

“Jesus.” Dokey dove the ROV, and the bottom reappeared.

Down 24,056 feet.

Brande fought off thinking about the immense pressure of all that water trying to get inside his tiny sphere.

Ping!

The sonar volume, set low, sounded off.

Brande glanced at the waterfall display, saw the slope of the canyon rising to the right. Outcroppings above them. He would have to watch out for that, warn Rastonov.

Small ridge coming up, still below them.

Ping, ping.

Not a ridge.

“Right there, Dane.”

Brande switched his attention to the starboard display and saw what Gargantua was seeing.

Soviet A2e rocket.

The top stage, with stabilizing fins, was still connected to the payload stage, the pointed module end lower on the slope. It was a hell of a lot bigger than he had expected it to be. He had seen the recorded video pictures of the boosters and first stage, but with only the perspective offered by the sea floor, he had not gotten a feeling for the size of the thing.

“Hot damn!” someone from above shouted.

“Let’s get the hoods on, Okey.”

They donned the protective hoods, and Brande immediately felt handicapped. The big glass plate visor restricted his vision to the side.

Easing the power stick forward, and nosing down with the right stick, Brande moved the submersible in until the cliff and the rocket body became visible under DepthFinder’s floodlights.

He picked up the microphone, shoved it under the hood, and said, “Pyotr, we’ve got it. You want to come to one-nine, four-seven, one-oh, two-eight?”

“We are on the way, Dane.”

“I’m looking it over,” Roskens said. “Okey, you want to circle it, maybe get in a little closer.”

“Anything for you, sweetheart,” Dokey said, taking the mike from Brande.

For ten minutes, Dokey and Roskens talked back and forth, and he poked Gargantua in closer and closer to the depleted rocket.

The skin was pretty banged up, crumpled in places, creased in others. The whole thing looked to be bent along its length. The two fins that could be seen were mangled badly.

The Soviet Seeker swam into Gargantua’s view, also probing. “You here, Pyotr?”

“Yes, Dane. We are behind and above you. Now moving to your right side.”

From the Olʼyantsev, Oberstev, who was viewing the Seeker pictures, said, “It is in a dangerous position. If we try to cut the payload module away, the rocket may push it further down.”

“Also, General,” Brande said, “directly above us is a rock ledge that extends partway over the wreckage.”

“General,” Roskens said, “do you have drawings of the rocket? At least of the payload module?”

Oberstev did not hesitate. “I will send Colonel Cherbykov to get them from my cabin, and we will transfer them to you by photo scanner.”

They waited fifteen eternal minutes.

The digital readout that he had been ignoring read: 1915. Four hours and forty-five minutes to meltdown, if the Commonwealth nuke people were right.

Four hours to the surface.

“Pyotr,” Brande asked, “any radiation readings?”

“None, but our sonar picks up a hissing. I think it is freon boiling.”

Brande gulped and turned up the squelch on the sonar. “Definitely hissing,” Dokey said.

“You mind if we don’t listen to it?”

“Not a damned bit.”

Brande squelched the sonar down.

“Got it!” Roskens said. “Okey, move Gargantua forward, extend the cutting torch, and go where I tell you.”

“Tell me fast.”

She directed him, and Brande watched the monitor as Gargantua’s cutting torch appeared, then touched several places on the side of the payload module before Roskens told him, “Start there, Okey, and cut straight forward.”

The manipulator went down, slapped the side of the module, and…

The whole damned thing started to slide.

Three feet.

Four feet.

And stopped.

Dokey said, “In my next life, I’m going to be a neurosurgeon. It’s a damned sight easier.”

Brande went to the acoustic phone. “Pyotr, can you go sit on the rocket?”

“Keep pressure against it? Yes. But please hurry. We do not want to use up electrical power too quickly.”

The Sea Lion moved into view, coming from the right side, eased in against the rocket, and added power to its propellers.

A cloud of dust rose, blinding nearly all of them.

Dokey moved the ROV in again, found his starting place, and started cutting the thin aluminum skin with the electrode cutting tip.

Brande called Oberstev, “General, can we access the switch module from down here?”

“I have an open line to the nuclear people, Mr. Brande. I will ask.”

A few moments later, he said, “It would be difficult. They do not know what tools you have available, but the reactor is in a sealed container. Access doors would have to be removed, as would a large computer component, before the switch module could be reached. They are sending me complete instructions.”

Brande sighed. A lot of this could have been taken care of a lot earlier.

“All right, General. Once weʼve cut away the side of the pay-load bay, what then?”

“The reactor is secured to the framework inside the module by four bolts. They could be unbolted or simply cut.”

“Weʼll cut them.”

Dokey had completed a thirty-foot cut along one side and a sixteen-or seventeen-foot cut around the bottom circumference of the payload module. He was starting up the near side, working close to the seabed.

“Mel?” Brande asked.

“He’s coming,” Rae Thomas responded. She sounded breathless.

Brande wanted to see her pretty badly.

“What you got, babe?” Sorenson asked.

“How much cable do we have?”

“We’re lifting about three tons?”

“General?” Brande asked.

“I am converting the measurement. Less than that. Four thousand, two hundred pounds.”

“I can run out the port-side winch, then hook it into the starboard, then into the’midships, and get you thirty thousand feet, Dane. Do the reverse coming back up.”

“Do that, Mel. Use four or five of the sub weights to get it down here fast, and we can cut them away. Better put a sonar reflector on it so we can locate it.”

“What kind of connection you going to make?”

“There are two lift rings on the reactor,” Roskens said.

“Hook then?” Sorenson asked.

“That’ll do,” Dokey said, “And I’ll weld the son of a bitch in place. It’s not coming off.”

Brande passed that message.

At 1942 hours, Dokey used Gargantua’s manipulator with the claws and peeled the skin from the module. He then had to cut away three interior structural members at Rosken’s direction.

It took four minutes for Gargantua, guided by Dokey’s interpretation of the sonar readout, to locate and latch onto the cable suspended from the research vessel. It did not look very substantial, but Brande knew it was tested to five tons.

After glancing at the chronometer readout, Dokey was surprisingly quick in cutting away the weights, fastening the hook to the lift ring, then welding it in place with two spot welds. Gargantua backed away, keeping an eye on everything. Brande spoke into the mike, “Mel, take up slack.”

“Keep in mind, Dane, that we’re bouncing ten or twelve feet. That slack is going to come up unexpectedly.”

“Let’s everyone back off a bit. Pyotr, take it up. You can head for the surface.”

The Sea Lion rose from her perch on the rocket body, and it started to slide, then roll down the slope.

It went twenty feet, the cable jerked taut, and the reactor came free of the module, swinging freely to the south.

Brande turned DepthFinder to follow it.

It went nearly a hundred yards into yet deeper water, following the only guide it had, the position of the Orion on the surface, and then slowed to a standstill for a moment, then abruptly jumped as the wave action above tugged at it.

“I hope to hell that cable can take the stress,” Dokey said.

Brande turned up the sonar, heard the awful hiss, and closed it down again.

“Dumping weights,” he said.

The lieutenant commander named Acery had lent Overton a set of binoculars, and from the bridge of the Bronstein, he had been scanning the seas on a regular basis for the last two hours.

They all knew it was coming up.

Every warship in the cordon had moved in, tightening the circle, and every searchlight available was trained on the two ships in the center of the circle, the Orion and the Timofey Ol’yantsev. The circle seemed a lot tighter than it was since the turbulent seas kept each ship quite a ways apart.

Overton guessed the circle was a mile in diameter. Even with the searchlights and the binoculars, it was difficult for him to see the Olʼyantsev, some 400 yards away.

The yacht with all of the radio, television, and newspaper reporters had been told to stay out of the cordoned-off area, and Overton felt, probably excessive, glee at that. There would not be video at eleven.

He thought that his manner aboard ship — staying out of the way, being polite — had paid off. Most of the officers were almost cordial to him now.

Between scans of the sea, Overton had been jotting on a yellow pad, writing the start of what was going to be an in-depth story on the amazing cooperation between the Russians and Americans in this time of crisis.

It was shaping up.

He raised the binoculars and looked toward the research and patrol ships again. Scanned the raging waters near them.

Nothing.

He took a quick look to the right, toward the Kane.

Nothing.

On their left was the CIS cruiser Kynda, and Overton checked it with the glasses.

Noth…

Looked again. Refocused.

Cruiser.

Going like a bat out of hell.

OCEAN FREE screamed from the hull.

“Hey!” Overton yelled, pointing.

Every officer on the bridge turned, raising their field glasses to their eyes.

Why had someone not seen Aaron coming on a radar or something?

But where was he going?

Overton trained his glasses on the research ship, but did not see anything he had not seen in the last hours.

Switched to the Commonwealth ship. Same thing.

Wait.

A hundred yards this side of the CIS ship, something was bobbing in the sea.

He leaned into the window, spun the focus wheel.

A submersible had just surfaced. All he could see was the sail, and it disappeared, falling behind a wave crest.

Alarms sounded and the Bronstein surged forward.

Overton held onto a grab bar, trying to keep the binoculars trained on his target.

Jesus! That Aaron was crazy as hell.

Probably did not know the difference between a reactor and a submersible.

Getting close.

The cruiser was maybe a couple hundred feet from the sub.

He was going to stop?

No. Plunging straight ahead.

The submersible rose into view at the top of a wave.

Overton felt sick. It was as if he personally had pushed Aaron into this.

No.

Yes.

Maybe.

The cruiser slammed into the sub when it was at the top of the wave.

A second went by, two seconds.

Wilson Overton saw the flash of the detonation before he heard it. Bright yellow-red-orange fireball.

The thunder rolled slowly toward him, but he was already bent over, his stomach contracting, and his supper splashing on the bulkhead.

Brande had been talking to Pyotr Rastonov when Rastonov’s phone went dead.

He had immediately asked Rae, “What happened up there?”

“God, Dane, it’s awful.”

“Jesus, what? The reactor?”

Dokey looked at him with a white face.

“No. Some cruiser just crashed into the Sea Lion. It blew up. Fuel tanks.”

Brande’s stomach churned.

“I should have gone to the bathroom before we left,” Dokey said.

“The Olʼyantsev and the Bronstein are putting boats over.”

“How about the reactor?”

“Mel says another hundred feet.”

Brande looked at his own depth readout. They were at 600 feet and rising at the maximum rate.

“Everybody ready?”

“Yes,” she said. “Bob’s got a crew ready, and he’s talked to the Russian nuclear people. Svetlana did the translation.”

By the time the DepthFinder reached the surface and began to toss in the swells, the reactor was on the aft deck of the Orion. Brande cruised around near the stern, waiting.

Dokey talked to Connie Alvarez-Sorenson on the UHF.

At twenty-one minutes after midnight, Bob Mayberry came on the radio. “Control rods are shut down, Dane.”

“Son of a bitch! Good job, Bob.”

“Aw, hell! Those guys in Russia were wrong. I think we had smother couple hours.”