The Krone Experiment (17 page)

“So what did you say you are doing about all
this?” Rutherford wanted to know.

“Not jackshit.” Isaacs described his skirmish
with McMasters.

When he finished, Rutherford inquired, “Can’t
you get McMasters to reopen the file, now that you have this
confirmation from our data?”

“I doubt it.” Isaacs frowned in concentration
and rubbed his prominent nose. He got up and paced the room. Post
handball thirst nagged at him. He wished he had a cold beer.

“You’ve told me something new. The source of
energy driving the seismic waves somehow proceeds into the ocean.
That banishes my lingering suspicion that we were dealing with an
ordinary, if highly regular, seismic phenomenon. But we’re no
closer to understanding what’s really happening. Without a more
substantial change in the situation, McMasters would stand to lose
face if he backs down. I’ve got to have something beyond the fact
that this thing is amphibious before I can go back to him and
convince him to reopen our investigation.”

He crossed the room twice more, thinking.

“He’s right that there’s no obvious reason to
consider this Agency business. But dammit! It’s got to be
somebody’s business.”

Rutherford rubbed his chin. “Is this thing
dangerous?”

Isaacs stopped pacing and faced the man
seated at the desk. “Not clear, is it? Whatever it is, it makes a
lot of noise that travels through rock and water. But noise alone
doesn’t make it dangerous.” He resumed his pacing.

“The scary part is that something is moving
through that rock and water, making the noise. We haven’t the
faintest idea what. That doesn’t make it a threat, but it sure as
hell makes me nervous!”

Rutherford leaned forward on his desk,
watching Isaacs perform his epicycles. “Listen. Your seismic data
were ideal to track this thing over large distances coherently and
establish that it moves along a fixed direction. But with your hint
of where and when to look, our sonar detections should give a
higher precision. We could put a ship right on top of it and find
out what we’re actually up against.”

Isaacs sprawled stiffly in a chair, as if he
might leap out of it again at a moment’s notice. “Actually, we
could do something like that on land, too, if McMasters hadn’t tied
my hands,” he responded. “You’re right, though, you’re in a
position to proceed, and I’m not.

“There is a practical point,” Isaacs
continued. “As it stands now, you don’t formally have enough
information to move on your own. You need our knowledge that it
behaves in a systematic way.”

Rutherford nodded his assent.

“But I can’t give it to you officially
because of this roadblock McMasters has thrown up.”

Isaacs smiled and leaned forward in his
chair. “I think you’re going to have to wake up in the middle of
the night with a sudden insight. Your past brilliant record would
presage such a breakthrough.”

Rutherford gave an exaggerated “aw shucks”
gesture. “Actually, it might be better if it didn’t come directly
from me. McMasters knows we’re friends, and he might fit things
together and give you a hard time for leaking information. I think
I can handle it so that one of my associates has the
inspiration.”

The two men grinned at one another and then
lapsed into a contemplative silence. After several minutes,
Rutherford stirred and walked over to a window and looked out.

He turned and asked, “What in hell are we
getting into here, Bob?”

Isaacs returned his look, unspeaking.

Rutherford continued, “I keep coming back to
the fact that this thing is locked to a fixed direction in space.
That must be a crucial hint. And the fact that it moves easily
through solid Earth and miles of water. What does that mean?” He
turned to the window again, anxious to express disturbing thoughts,
but subconsciously unable to face his friend at the same time.

“You know the image I get? A beam. A beam of
some kind, focused into the Earth and playing back and forth.”

He turned suddenly, angry at a situation that
departed so profoundly from his experience, forcing him to strange,
uncomfortable extrapolations.

“Damn it, Bob, you know I’m a hard-nosed,
practical man. But don’t we have to face up to the idea that
something is out there? Doing this to the Earth?”

Isaacs ground his right fist into his left
palm. “I confess, Av, when I first heard about the selective
orientation in space, I found myself toying with such a notion. I
put it out of my mind as idle fantasy. Now I don’t know. I do know
the more I learn about this thing, the more scared I am.”

Avery Rutherford stood next to the captain of
the USS Stinson and gazed out across the ocean as it reflected the
early morning Sun. Rutherford delighted at being able to spend
these long days of mid-June where he loved to be the most. His job
was challenging and important, but it kept him behind a desk far
too much. He had grown up in boats of all sizes in the waters off
Newport and the only time he felt fully alive was at sea. A hectic
week had been required to feed Isaacs’ hint to his aide, Szkada,
then to work up a plan and arrange for the ship, but it was worth
it. Rutherford felt great!

The captain barked commands as they closed on
the chosen position. Finally, the trim craft lay dead in the water,
and they waited and watched and listened. The ship, a Spruance
class destroyer, was designed for intelligence work and bristled
with sophisticated tracking and detection devices. At last, word
came up from the sonar room that their target had appeared, moving
incredibly rapidly, headed for the surface in a scant thirty
seconds. Rutherford gritted his teeth and trained his field glasses
on the water a thousand yards away where they had calculated the
influence would reach the surface.

The sonar data were automatically fed into
the ship’s computers to plot the trajectory. He listened to the
tense messages on the intercom from the sonar room, the voice
clipped, rapid, hurrying to keep up with something moving too fast.
The new prediction showed the point of surfacing to be several
hundred yards further from the ship than originally estimated, but
still very close. Ten seconds. Rutherford felt a knot of tension as
beads of sweat grew on his forehead. He tried to keep his mind
neutral, but an image kept intruding, that of a ray guided by an
unseen hand. He could sense that ray arcing through space like
nighttime tracer bullets, then cutting a swath through the
Earth.

Over the intercom came the tinny squawk as
the sonar operator counted down the time to contact with the
surface:

“Five.”

“Four.”

“Three.”

“Two.”

“One.”

Rutherford held the binoculars tightly to his
face, the magnified image of the water welded in his brain. He
braced himself for the shock, either physical or mental.

“Zero.”

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing happened except for a
small splash at the margin of his field of vision. Then he blinked
and even that was gone. Faintly over the water a strange hissing
carried, but that, too, quickly faded.

Rutherford and the captain exchanged amazed
looks.

The captain punched a button on a
console.

“What have you got?”

“Nothing, Captain, it’s gone,” came the
negative reply.

He turned to Rutherford.

“If it’s like the Seamount event, sonar
should pick up something going down after some delay.”

Rutherford nodded.

The sonar man had been alerted not to
increase the gain on his instrument in the interlude.

Again came the faint hiss. Rutherford raised
his glasses too late to see a second rise of spray some distance
from the first splash.

“Whup! There it is!” came the report of
reacquisition from the sonar room. They listened as the relayed
reports followed the acoustic noise to the sea bottom far
below.

Rutherford spent the next two hours in the
computer room overseeing the analysis of the tapes of the sonar
signal. His examination of the previous underwater events suggested
to him that the phenomenon did not move along precisely the same
line. This data supported that view. There was a certain erratic
behavior superposed on the basic fixed direction of motion. They
would never be able to tell exactly where and when the surfacing
would occur. He thought to himself, so your aim’s not perfect, you
bastards, and took some satisfaction in that.

The estimate of the next nearest surfacing
was refined on the computer and Rutherford reported that to the
captain. After some discussion they agreed that for all the furor
underwater, whatever it was seemed to lose potency at the surface.
They agreed to get as close as possible to the next event. The
destroyer headed for a spot about a hundred and ninety miles west
which, in a little more than twenty-four hours, would fall along
the right path at the proper phase so that the phenomenon should
approach the surface.

They arrived in late afternoon and spent the
remainder of the daylight hours cruising the area obtaining
comparison data on the sonar background and checking for anything
that could represent a precursor to the expected event. There was
none.

Rutherford turned in early. He spent a
restless night and dropped into sound sleep only shortly before
daybreak when a young crewman awakened him.

Two thousand miles west of where the Stinson
made slow circles in the mid-Atlantic, Robert Isaacs roused from a
troubled sleep, carrying his dreams with him. He was watching the
tops of the heads of figures as they roamed the flat terrain of
satellite photos. One figure tried to turn its face upward to be
recognized. Isaacs could feel the strain of its effort, the head
swiveling backward, the forehead tilting upward, upward, upward,
but never enough to reveal the face.

Then, there—Not a Russian! Rutherford!

Isaacs jerked awake, staring at the ceiling,
his pulse racing. His twitch disturbed Muriel. She snuggled over to
him, cupped a bicep in her hand, and pushed her nose into his
shoulder.

“You all right, honey?”

“Uumph. Just a dream.” He turned toward her
and threw a comforting arm over her hips. Soon she was breathing
deeply again. He lay awake, slowly relaxing back toward sleep.
Rutherford. . . Ship. . . Water. . . Sonar. . .

The Novorossiisk!

This time he sat bolt upright. No dream. Dear
god! How could he be so dense? The Novorossiisk was so long ago,
succeeded in his attention by the attack on FireEye, the shuttle
mission, the feverish developments at Tyuratam. But this had to be
it! The Novorossiisk had been in the Med, near thirty- three
degrees latitude. The Seamount had reported something going up and
something going down. Rutherford had radioed the same behavior
yesterday. The Novorossiisk had reported something going down. Why
not up? Lost in the shuffle? Who knows? Must check that out. Was
the Novorossiisk in the right place? Check that out. Oh goddamn,
Rutherford said he was going to sit right on it!

He rolled out of bed.

“Bob?”

“I think Av Rutherford is in danger. I’ve got
to make some calls.”

“Do you want me to get up?”

“No, that’s crazy; you’ve got to be fresh in
court at nine.”

He pulled on some sweatpants in lieu of a
robe and fumbled out the door to the stairs. In the kitchen he
blinked in the glare as he tripped the light. He punched the
familiar number into the phone, missed the next to last digit in
his bleariness, swore, and punched it again. He requested the night
radio operator to call him on a secure line. As he awaited the
call, he grabbed a note pad and tried to figure out if the
Novorossiisk had been right on Danielson’s magic trajectory. He was
still too befogged and the numbers too cumbersome. But it was
plausible. Too plausible! This thing they chased not only moved
through the Earth and oceans, it punched holes in ships!

As he stared at his scribbled notes on the
pad, he slowly became aware of the smell of fresh coffee permeating
his nostrils. He looked up to see Muriel fetching cups and saucers
out of the cabinet. She caught his mixed look of guilt and
irritation that she should be up tending to him and headed him
off.

“I can use an early start, too. I need to
polish my strategy.”

Her husband still looked disgruntled.

“Besides,” she continued, “if I beat my
minions in to work on a Monday morning it will fire them with such
defensive zeal that we’ll just blow the opposition out of
court.”

Isaacs smiled wanly at this image and rose to
hug her from behind.

“All right, counselor, you win. Let’s have
some coffee.”

He broke off his embrace suddenly at the
sound of the telephone, whirling to grab it in mid ring. He sat and
hunched over the receiver as if to make it part of him.

“Hello? Yes?” He repeated a sequence of code
numbers. “Right. I want you to patch a call through the Navy. Top
Priority. For Captain Avery Rutherford on the Destroyer USS
Stinson. It’s on patrol in the Atlantic. Yes, I know what time it
is. What’s a satellite link for? It’s two hours later on that ship.
Yes, I understand, but this is extremely urgent.” He glanced at his
watch. 4:38. Nine minutes until contact. “Yes, I know you will.
Yes, immediately please. Thank you.”

He hung up the phone.

“Problem?”

“Not in principle, it’s just that our vaunted
instantaneous satellite communication net is designed to function
from various war rooms, not from cozy Georgetown kitchens.”

He lapsed into tense silence, glancing at the
coffee pot, his watch, the phone. Time dragged slowly. After an
excruciating interval, the coffee maker stopped gurgling, sighed
its readiness. He looked at his watch for the tenth time. 4:40.
Seven minutes. How long would it take to move the ship if they did
get through? Several minutes? When would it be too late? He did not
look up when Muriel put the coffee in front of him. He took a few
sips and then watched it steam away its heat, its life force. 4:44.
Three minutes, probably too late, anyway. He felt ill.