Ultra Deep (12 page)

“So, Hobin Rood and Tire Fruck,” had been the greeting from Miriam Baker, Brandeʼs favorite librarian at UCSD’s library, when the two of them approached the counter at four o’clock.

“Hi, Miriam,” Brande said.

Dokey leaned on the high counter and smiled at her.

“No,” she said.

“Damn,” Dokey said.

“Miriam,” Brande said, “the two of us want to become experts on nuclear power. Say, in about two hours.”

It took her all of fifteen seconds to think it over. “You,” she said to Brande, “go see Dr. Harold Provost. And you,” to Dokey, “come with me.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Dokey said.

Brande went across campus and had to wait twenty minutes before Provost was free. He spent an hour-and-a-half with the professor, and by the time he got back to the library, Dokey was stocked up with a thick sheaf of photocopies and fifteen books. Brande shared the load and they carried the books out to Brande’s Pontiac.

It was a 1957 Pontiac Bonneville convertible, somewhat on the rare side, finished in white with powder blue trim and a matching blue interior. Like its sisters on the short production run, it was fuel injected, and it spent about as much time in the shop, having the fuel injection fine-tuned, as it did on the road. Brande still liked it better than any other car he had owned.

Dokey was less nostalgic. He preferred cars that took advantage of the technology currently available. On the subject of Brandeʼs car, they had reached an accommodation. Dokey would not bad-mouth it, and Brande would not fire him.

They climbed in and slammed the heavy doors. Brande turned the ignition key, the V-8 engine fired, and purred. He felt a bit self-complacent about that.

“Let’s put the top down,” Dokey said.

“Let’s not.”

“Ah, come on.”

“I’m looking for a replacement hydraulic cylinder”

“It won’t go down?”

Brande pulled out onto Miramar Road without answering.

Dokey finally let it go by.

Brande drove slowly south through the campus, then turned east onto La Jolla Village Drive. Two blocks later, he slipped through the cloverleaf onto the San Diego Freeway south and slapped the accelerator down. The heavy car responded like a jackrabbit and soon he was holding the speedometer at seventy-five. Before their accommodation about automotive criticism had been reached, Dokey had likened the acceleration to that of an obese jackrabbit.

Mission Bay, with its complex of islands and parks, went by on the right. They sailed past the International Airport, curved through downtown San Diego, recurved past Balboa Park, skipped the turnoff onto the Coronado Bay Bridge, and exited the freeway on 28th Street.

The Pontiac had been issued a decal for the front bumper which gave it something of an exalted visitor status on the U.S. Naval Station. Brande drove straight to the headquarters building and found a parking space.

“We’re late,” Dokey noted.

“We’re normally late,” Brande said. “They’ve come to expect it.”

Avery Hampstead had arranged the briefing for them, and Brande and Dokey sat through a three-hour encapsulation of nuclear reactors presented to them by four different naval experts.

Afterward, starved, they had spent another forty-five minutes in a steak house, working on T-bones and rehashing what they had learned. By then, the news had broken on TV, and the few diners around them had a topic of conversation.

“I’m a little overwhelmed,” Brande admitted. “This isn’t a field I’ve ever had the slightest interest in.”

“It’s okay, Chief. I’ve got it down pat.”

“Do you really?”

“No. But give me a few days with all those books Miriam picked out for me.”

Brande had finally parked the Pontiac in the lot next to the office around eleven. They carried their supply of books upstairs and found the office populated by a dour group of MVU employees. A TV was going in one corner, with most of the crew of the
Orion
gathered around it.

Bob Mayberry was stretched out on two desktops, sound asleep, and he snored. No one paid any attention to him.

Svetlana Polodka and Valeri Dankelov were head-to-head at one side of the room, engaged in an intense discussion that required lots of hand gestures.

Kim Otsuka and Mel Sorenson were debating something with Ingrid Roskens and Larry Emry.

Rae Thomas was sitting at her desk, playing with her computer terminal. Her hands moved over the keyboard with some degree of force and anger, Brande thought.

They all looked up when Dokey shoved the door open. Brande dropped his load of books on the nearest desk.

Thomas rose from her chair and said, “Where have you two been?”

“Research, Rae. Important stuff. Everybody gather around, will you?”

Sorenson woke up Mayberry, and everyone moved to the center of the room, sitting on chairs and desks. All of the overhead fluorescents were on, and in the harsh glare, Brande realized they were all on the edge of fatigue. Their eyes were droopy. Their faces demonstrated their concern.

He had known most of them for many years, and they were as much his family as the line of his variously named ancestors back in Minnesota and Sweden. He leaned against a desk and looked at them with affection.

Bob Mayberry, long and lanky, and skinnier than should have been possible, had both hands cupped in front of his mouth, stifling yawns. His shock of corn-colored hair was in disarray. Mayberry was Director of Electronic Technology, and he had a special interest in sonar.

Lawrence Emry, with a PhD in geophysics, was the Director of Exploration. He was short at five-five, bald as the national bird, sported a bushy gray mustache, and was the oldest employee of Marine Visions. He was sixty-two and a widower for the past three years.

All of the heads of Marine Visions’s teams were gathered around him. The best in the business, people Brande could depend upon.

Rae Thomas appeared a little unfocused, as if her day had frazzled her nerves somewhat. She was wearing a short white dress that was strained in the right places, but which was slightly wrinkled. Her light-blond hair was fluffed by her fingers rather than a brush. Her blue eyes were vivid, firing off a few sparks, and her mouth was one short grim line. Worrying about money again, Brande thought.

“All right,” he said, pointing at the live, but muted, television set, “you’ve all heard the news. I’ll tell you about my day.”

He quickly went through the meeting with Hampstead and the briefings he and Dokey had received from Dr. Provost and from the Navy. He did not hold anything back.

“You have a contract from Commerce or the Navy?” Thomas asked.

“No, not yet. I wanted to go over it with all of you, first. I won’t make a commitment if we don’t have consensus here.”

“Because it’s dangerous?” Emry asked.

“There is risk, yes. A high risk.”

“How high is high, Dane?” Ingrid Roskens asked.

She was Chief Structural Engineer, responsible for the basic designs of the domes at Harbor One, the mining and agricultural complexes, and at Ocean Deep. She was in her forties, auburn-haired with traces of gray, and green-eyed, a proud product of Louisville, Kentucky. Her husband ran a student-counseling center at San Diego State University. She was the only MVU associate who did not know how to swim, and she did not want to learn.

“The feds are trying to pin it down, Ingrid. Provost and the Navy people say that, if it does let go while weʼre…while someone is in the immediate vicinity, say a couple thousand meters, the radiation dosage would very likely be fatal. Three-to six-month life span.”

“What’s the likelihood of the Russians retrieving it, Dane?” asked Mayberry.

“Much less than fifty percent, the last I heard, Bob. My understanding is that the closest submersible is undergoing retrofit and not available.”

“They’re flying the
Sea
Lion
in from Murmansk,” Thomas said.

Brande looked at her. She had talked to someone, probably Hampstead.

“The
Sea
Lion
can’t do it,” Emry said, “not if the reports on location are correct.”

“Twenty-six degrees, twenty minutes north, one-seventy-six degrees, ten minutes east,” Dokey told him.

Emry got up and walked across the office to a topographical map of the Pacific pinned to the wall between two windows. He searched briefly.

“Nope,” he said. “Well, if they got lucky and it came to rest on a mountaintop, maybe. We’ve got a mean depth of fifty-two hundred meters. My bookie will tell me the odds are in favor of it hitting in some valley or canyon. Locating it may be a tougher job than raising it.”

“It means,” Dokey said, “that we’ve got to use
DepthFinder
and SARSCAN.”

“Oh, I think so,” Emry agreed. “I’m in, Dane. I can always use a challenge before breakfast.”

“Ingrid?” Brande asked.

“You’re going to need a structural engineer?”

“Probably. It’ll depend upon the condition of the reactor body and the module.”

“I’ve always wanted to glow in the dark. In the light, too.”

“Thanks. Mel?”

The captain of the
Orion
mused to himself for a while, then said, “So it goes busto while we’re on the surface. We’d still have some time to get out of the area.”

“I think so, but I certainly can’t guarantee it,” Brande said.

“I’m going to get my kids over in the corner and talk it over,” Sorenson said.

The crew members of the research vessel, ranging from old salts who had circumnavigated the globe a dozen times to a teenager who had run out of money for surfing, followed Sorenson to one corner of the office.

Brande looked to Otsuka. “Kim?”

She did not display the smile and laughing eyes to which he had grown accustomed. Her mouth was downcast.

“I should tell you, Dane, that I received a telephone call from the Japanese Consulate.”

“Oh?”

“Hokkaido Marine Industries has a prototype submersible which they say is capable of depths to twenty-two thousand feet. It has not been fully tested, but the Tokyo government has asked them to make an attempt to locate the reactor. In response, Hokkaido Marine has asked the government to intervene and request that I return to Japan to assist them.”

Brande was disappointed. “You agreed, of course?”

“I have yet to make up my mind.”

“All right, Kim. You do whatever you need to do.”

The reclusive Dankelov raised his hand.

“Valeri?”

“Svetlana and I have a similar dilemma, Dane. We have been discussing the matter.”

“I can understand,” Brande said, though he did not want to do so. He considered both Dankelov and Polodka as world-class engineers. He did not want to lose them.

“The…accident,” Dankelov said, “is properly the responsibility of the CIS government, our government. We really should join our ships on the scene and offer our services.” Polodka nodded her approval of his statement.

“I respect that position, Valeri. I would point out, however, that the
DepthFinder
has the best chance of making the recovery within the probable time span whatever that may be.”

“September tenth,” Thomas said.

“What?” Dokey said.

“While you two were out researching, or whatever, Avery called. I don’t think he was going to tell us, but I got it out of him.”

“Tell us what?” Brande asked.

“The nuclear experts are saying meltdown will occur between September tenth and September eighteenth.”

“Shit,” Dokey said.

“Mel!” Brande called toward the corner of the office.

“I heard, Dane. I’m calculating now.”

Silence ruled while Sorenson tapped on his pocket calculator.

Finally, he said, “I can push
Orion
at top revolutions all the way, and maybe get twenty-eight knots out of her. Given favorable winds and currents, we’ll be in the area on the night of the sixth, or early morning on the seventh. Better call it the seventh”

“And have only three days of search time,” Emry said. “I don’t know that we can swing that, Dane.”

“It could be more than three days, Larry.”

“You want to bet on it?”

“No.”

More silence.

“Did Avery say anything else, Rae?”

“No. He was rushing for a meeting and I couldn’t pin him down on a contract or a fee,” she said.

She did not say, “in which case, we go belly-up,” but it was in her tone.

But Brande’s team was falling apart, anyway. With Otsuka, Dankelov and Polodka out, he was losing the expertise he might need on-site.

“Bob?”

“I’m thinking about Rachel and the kids, Dane,” Mayberry said. “Let me think for a few more minutes.”

“We can beat the goddamned deadline,” Dokey said with conviction.