The Krone Experiment (18 page)

The phone rang. He jerked the receiver to his
ear.

“Mr. Isaacs?”

“Yes!”

“I’ve got the Stinson. They’re looking for
Captain Rutherford. Will you hold on?”

“Yes, of course. He’ll be on the bridge.”

Isaacs could hear the operator relay this
message to the radio man on the Stinson. Then he spoke to Isaacs
again.

“Bit of a crunch there, sir. They seem to be
in the middle of an operation.”

“Yes, I know.”

There was a long pause.

“Sir?” The voice sounded worried.

“What is it?”

“There seemed to be some kind of ruckus
there, and then I lost contact.”

“You what?”

“I’m sorry, sir. I lost contact with the
Stinson.”

Isaacs remained silent a long moment.

“Sir?”

“Okay. Try to get them back. Call me when you
do.”

“Yes, sir.”

Isaacs hung the receiver on its wall cradle
and then slowly lowered his head onto his hands. Seated next to
him, Muriel reached a hand to his bare shoulder, her face drawn
with concern.

The sea lay calm and the rising sun burned
along the gentle swells.

The routine of the previous session repeated.
Rutherford took a position on the bridge and stood checking the
liquid crystal digits as they swapped on his watch. As the time
counted down to scarce minutes, an orderly stepped onto the
bridge.

“Captain Rutherford?”

Rutherford swiveled to face the young
man.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Sir, you have a call on the radiophone.”

“I can’t take it now! Tell them if it’s
important to hold on for a few minutes.”

The orderly sensed the tension and stepped
back against the bulkhead to watch as Rutherford turned to scan the
ocean. Within seconds of the predicted time, the sonar room
reported.

“Here she comes!”

Allowing for the inaccuracies in the
calculations, Rutherford had stationed the ship precisely at the
point where surfacing was most probable. Those inaccuracies plus
the intrinsic meandering of the position convinced him they would
be very lucky to be within several hundred yards of the event. He
hoped they would be able to see something to help clear up the
mystery.

“Coming straight up! Right underneath
us!”

Just so, ruminated Rutherford. At great
depths, small lateral offsets in position were difficult to detect.
On his watch, the minute digit shifted up by one. Ten seconds.

“Two thousand meters!” squawked the sonar
room link. “Uh, Captain? It’s still headed right for us!”

In a corner of his mind, a thought began to
dawn on Rutherford. Maybe they had been too brash, forsaking a
second distant observation. Our measurements aren’t exact, he
thought, the thing does wander a little erratically. How confident
can I be that our best estimate is
wrong
, that it will
surface nearby, but not
exactly
where I predicted? What if
the small random motion just offsets our position errors and we are
correct by blind luck? Even worse, what if many periods are
required before the random motion causes an appreciable change in
the position of surfacing? Suppose over the small time span since
the last event there has been negligible change and my predictions
are precisely correct?

He wanted to be nearby, but, with a sinking
feeling he knew he did not want to be exactly on the point of
surfacing.

The sonar room began the final countdown.
There was no time to move the ship anyway. “Five.” “Four.” “Three.”
“Two.” “One.” “Ze—”

*****

Chapter 7

A small hole appeared in the thick plate of
the hull just to the port side of the keel. A disturbance winked
through the fuel oil stored in the large ballast tank shaped to the
hull. Brief instants later similar holes were created in the top of
the fuel tank and then in the floor of the engine room. In the next
moment a deep score ran across the shaft of one of the four large
General Electric gas turbines. A crack sprang out from this defect
augmented by the huge centrifugal force, and the multibladed shaft
went careening like a rip saw toward the turbine casing as yet
another hole penetrated the ceiling of the engine room. On went the
succession of holes as if on a rising plumbline, through decks,
furniture, equipment, until a last long gash ripped through the
floor of the helicopter pad.

“—ro!”

The damaged turbine exploded, tilling the
engine compartment with high velocity titanium-blade shrapnel and
burning fuel. Weakened by the small incident hole, the floor
buckled under the disintegrated turbine. Flame leaped down along
the vapors leading to the fuel tank. After the briefest hiatus, the
fuel tank exploded. The force of this release was directed upward
along the rising line of perforations. The penetrated structural
members gave way, and a violent stream of shredded metal and
superheated gas blew a cavity upward into the guts of the ship. The
explosion also tore like a rocket into the surrounding water. In
reaction, the destroyer listed rapidly and severely to starboard.
As the ship pendulumed back to port, water rushed into the new
gaping hole and splashed upward following the path of the blast
into the ship. Great portions of the upper midship sections filled
with water. The ship was rendered top-heavy. As it rebounded, its
natural capacity to right itself was destroyed, and it carried on
over. In the space of a minute the Stinson capsized, floating
bottom up, the ragged hole in the hull aimed at the Sun, narrowly
above the horizon. A handful of men survived. Avery Rutherford was
not among them.

That evening, still numb from loss, Isaacs
stared at the draft of the memo he had carefully composed. He was
reticent to commit himself to writing, but he could not just go
bursting into McMasters’ office and demand that Project QUAKER be
reinstated. McMasters would never hear him out. Instead, he had put
all the arguments he could muster into the memorandum. McMasters
would not want to read anything from him, but he would read it, out
of self-defense.

Memorandum

To: Kevin J. McMasters,

Deputy Director of Intelligence

From: Robert B. Isaacs,

Deputy Director for Scientific
Intelligence

Subject: Connection between the loss of the
USS Stinson, the Novorossiisk, and Project QUAKER

On June 14, the Navy Destroyer USS Stinson
was lost at sea while on a mission indirectly related to our now
inactive Project QUAKER. The circumstances bear marked resemblance
to those involving the Soviet carrier Novorossiisk. In this
memorandum, I set forth the case linking the USS Stinson, the
Novorossiisk, and Project QUAKER and call for the immediate
reactivation and vigorous prosecution of Project QUAKER.

Isaacs pictured McMasters resisting the urge
to scrunch the memo into a ball and toss it in the can.

As you will recall, Project QUAKER produced
evidence for a source of seismic waves that moved in a regular
pattern through the Earth. The trajectory of this motion is fixed
in space independent of the rotation of the Earth or its motion in
orbit around the Sun. The source of seismic waves always approaches
the Earth’s surface at 32° 47’ north longitude. Approximately forty
and one-quarter minutes later it has passed through the Earth and
approaches the surface again at 32° 47’ south longitude. It then
returns to the northern hemisphere nearing the surface at a
position about 1170 miles west of the previous location of
surfacing, due to the rotation of the Earth in the intervening
eighty minutes and thirty seconds.

One day later, the source of the seismic
signal will return to the surface about 190 miles west of the point
where it surfaced at nearly the same time the previous day. The
source of the seismic waves has approached the surface about 2000
times since it was first detected. Because of the incommensurate
motion of the seismic source and the rotation of the Earth,
however, the probability of the source returning to the surface
within even a few miles of any previous point of surfacing is very
small. Despite the underlying regularity of the motion of the
source of the seismic waves, the effects manifested at the surface
will be perceived to be highly irregular.

Isaacs paused at this point. McMasters
presumably knew the basic facts and he did not want to overdo here
nor delay getting to the meat of his argument, but he felt
compelled to summarize the issues to provide a context for the
pitch to come. His mind whirled with details that he would have
added for someone who wanted to really know what was going on, but
he pictured McMasters’ sneering skepticism and decided for the
fifth time that this was the best he could do.

I have learned through informal sources

Ha! Let the bastard chew on that one, thought
Isaacs. He’ll discover that Rutherford was on the Stinson and dig
like a dog to find some proof I violated his stricture. Well, let
him dig! I don’t confess to any active role for either me or the
Agency, so he’ll stew, but there’s not much he can do. Except
summarily reject the proposal. Damn!

that the Navy has sonar data that correlate
with the motion of the seismic source. The source of the seismic
noise apparently

Apparently. He pondered whether to leave that
word to honestly portray the possibility, remote to his mind, that
the strong circumstantial evidence had not been rigorously
confirmed, that there was no case in which both seismic and sonar
detectors picked up the signal of a single event to prove they were
related. McMasters might seize on such a subtlety. Isaacs sighed
and opted for honesty.

proceeds into the ocean. The source of the
sonar signal goes to the surface, ceases for about forty seconds,
then proceeds back to the ocean bottom. There is a strong
presumption that the source of seismic and sonar waves is in the
atmosphere for those forty seconds. The seismic and sonar waves
generated by the source of energy propagate over great distances,
contributing to their detectability. The lack of above-surface
confirmation suggests that the effects there are very
localized.

Now for the pitch, if he hasn’t set fire to
it by this time.

To conclude from the evidence that the
phenomenon is innocuous at the surface would be a grievous error.
The fates of the Novorossiisk and the Stinson show that this
phenomenon is destructive and must be understood and
eliminated.

The Stinson was on a mission to investigate
the sonar signals that are the counterpart of the seismic signals
tracked under Operation QUAKER. On June 13, the Stinson witnessed
the rising and falling sonar signal from a thousand yards, with no
appreciable surface effect. An associated hissing noise was
reported. On June 14, it was stationed directly on the path of the
rising sonar signal. The ship exploded, capsized and sank with the
loss of all but 23 of her crew of 259. Fragmentary evidence from
the survivors suggests that the fuel tanks exploded.

I believe the facts show that the
Novorossiisk suffered a similar fate. The Novorossiisk was at 32°
47’ when the incident occurred. Within the accuracy of our records,
she was at a location that would have been in phase with the rising
of the seismic/acoustic phenomenon. A hissing noise was reported on
the Novorossiisk before the fires broke out. A sonar signal was
reported afterwards.

The similarities between the Stinson and the
Novorossiisk events and the relations to the signal of Operation
QUAKER are too striking to be coincidence. There is every reason to
believe that the phenomenon that made the holes in the Novorossiisk
and triggered the fires on board had a similar, but unfortunately
more destructive, effect on the Stinson. This phenomenon also
generates the signals studied under Operation QUAKER.

The present facts are disturbing enough. Men
have died, equipment has been destroyed and we have drawn closer to
war. Even more troubling is that the underlying phenomenon is
completely without precedent, and its nature totally unknown. In
our present state of ignorance we may have no inkling of the true
magnitude of the problem that besets us.

We must take immediate action to discover
the nature of this phenomenon. I strongly recommend two steps. One
is the reinstatement of Project QUAKER and the enactment of similar
projects in all relevant agencies of the government. The second is
to communicate these findings to the Soviet Union to forestall the
developments that have succeeded the Novorossiisk event. In this
regard, I recommend a query to the Soviets regarding the detection
of a rising sonar signal just prior to the Novorossiisk event.
Confirmation of this prediction would help to convince the Soviets
of the innocence of the United States in the Novorossiisk affair
and tie together more firmly the disparate phenomena described
here.

When he finished reading the draft, Isaacs
stared at the last page, his eyes defocused, straining with his
mind’s eye to see where this attempt would lead. Despite himself,
his mind filled with an image of Rutherford, those last seconds,
desperately trapped in the submerged bridge. He shook his head and
rose from his desk. Something fearful was at work here. McMasters
had to free his hands to go after it. Kathleen was gone for the
day. He unlocked a cabinet and placed the clipped sheaf of paper in
the front of her work file.

In the parking lot he unlocked the door of
the car and half-tossed his briefcase into the passenger seat. He
sat behind the wheel a moment, feeling like driving, but with no
particular place to go. Finally, he wheeled out of the lot to the
rear exit from the grounds, past the guardhouse and down the long
leafy lane. He turned right on Route 123, but the traffic heading
into McLean was still fairly heavy, the driving unsatisfactory. He
joined the throng on the beltway headed north. He took the first
turn-off after crossing the Potomac and headed home, still
frustrated and deeply troubled.