Ultra Deep (40 page)

“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.”

*

0210 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 19' 59" NORTH, 176° 10' 33" EAST

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.

*

0325 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 19' 59" NORTH, 176° 10' 33" EAST

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

0400 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 19' 58" NORTH, 176° 10' 34" EAST

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?”