Ultra Deep

by William H. Lovejoy

  “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.

  He did not have to worry about a wife and family.

  Brande turned to face Thomas. He had saved her for last. She was always supportive, even when she did question his strategies.

  “How about you, Rae? What do you think?”

  “Don’t ask me, Dane. I’m resigning, anyway.”

  September 2

  Chapter Seven

  0004 HOURS LOCAL, SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  Brande looked so crestfallen, she could not believe it. He had to be acting. Most of the time, he was so damned hard to read.

  She had not really planned to announce her resignation in a group setting. It just slipped out.

  The room was pretty silent, the darkness of early morning intruding through the windows. She could hear a faulty fluorescent fixture buzzing. The Orion crew in the corner had turned around to stare at her. She felt as if she were on display, and she was conscious of the perspiration under her arms and the wrinkles in her dress.

  When she was in junior high school, she used to dream about wearing gowns and low-cut, steamy black cocktail dresses, dancing the night away with tall, handsome men and being the carefree center of attention. Those dreams had evaporated over time, and she did not normally worry about how she appeared in front of a crowd. She was not particularly concerned about being anyone’s center of attention.

  Why now?

  She spoke to the silence. “I’ve been offered a position at Scripps.”

  After she had made a few calls.

  No one said anything.

  “It’s difficult to turn down,” she added.

  More silence.

  Finally, Brande said, “Could we talk about this, Rae?”

  No immediate acquiescence, as he had shown with Kim, Svetlana and Valeri.

  “There’s not much to talk about.”

  Dokey shook his head sadly.

  Larry Emry said, “Who’s going to cover my checks?”

  Kim Otsuka said, “You keep this place together, Kaylene. How could you think of leaving?”

  Watching Brande’s face, Thomas thought he was as surprised by Kim’s statement as Thomas was. She had not thought that others really, really noticed what she did. They tended to be wrapped up in their own work.

  Brande pushed off the desk he was leaning on and crossed over to her. He gripped her elbow lightly and turned her toward the restrooms.

  “Let’s go over to my private office for a few minutes,” he said.

  She could not remember a time before when he had touched her.

  Almost without volition, she found herself headed toward the restrooms, dodging the varicolored desks and chairs, imperceptibly guided by Brande. The recalcitrant air conditioner vibrated loudly.

  He aimed her toward the men’s room.

  “I’m not going in there,” she said.

  He altered course toward the ladies, pushed open the door, and nudged her through the doorway.

  She shook her elbow free of his grasp, irritated that she had let him take control. The fluorescent lights seemed brighter than normal.

  The lights made Brande’s eyes seem more alive, but she had seen them like that before. It was the signal that his interest was growing into near-fanaticism. He could become overly zealous of a pet project, she had learned.

  His hair was tousled. He needed a haircut.

  “How come,” she asked, “you always march through the front door with a wild idea and expect that everyone here will jump at the chance to share your enthusiasm?”

  “I’m idealistic?” he asked, leaning back against the lavatory.

  “Very.”

  “Single-track mind?”

  “Extremely very”

  Brande sighed audibly. “I know I get carried away sometimes, Rae. Let the details slide. I didn’t, however, commit anyone.”

  “You’d let Kim, Valeri and Svetlana go?”

  “They’re not mine to control.”

  “And I am?”

  “What are you going to do at Scripps?”

  “What I want to do,” she said.

  “If that ocean out there gets hot, no one is going to be diving in it,” he countered.

  “Maybe,” she conceded.

  “We’ve got to do something. We’re the ones trained and equipped to do it.”

  “You’ve got to do something,” she said. “I can agree with that. It doesn’t have to include me.”

  “You want to be executive vice president?”

  “That’s just a title. You pass them around like candy, remember?”

  “Chief executive officer?”

  “That’s just another title. Conferring it wouldn’t change anything.”

  “With all of the power to organize, or reorganize, the company?”

  She wavered, but said, “No.”

  “Hire and fire?”

  “No.” That part was a little scary.

  Brande crossed his arms, his strong jaw lowered, and he stared at the floor. It was tiled in horrible, tiny octagonal ceramic pieces. Gold and blue.

  “Damn it, Rae. I don’t want you to leave.”

  “Why?”

  He looked up at her. “Because I need you.”

  She stared back and let her eyes show her disbelief. “For this particular task?”

  “For everything.”

  “Oh, damn it, Dane! Don’t do this to me.”

  “I mean it, Rae.”

  She studied his face, the lean, hard planes of it. Sometimes his expression could mean he was deadly serious, and sometimes the same expression hid his amusement; it was so difficult to tell. His eyes had darkened a bit, become pools into which she felt drawn. He smiled a trifle, a little boy’s smile.

  She felt a little giddy, then finally said, “Come on, let’s get this safari into the jungle.”

  He grinned. “You’re staying?”

  “Only because you finally said you needed me.”

  He pushed off the sink. “I’m glad.”

  “And because I’m the new CEO.”

  *

  0054 HOURS LOCAL, SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  Brande and Mel Sorenson toured the Orion together, inspecting her diesel engines, her steering, and her cycloidal propellers which were then retracted inside the hull. The dry and refrigerated lockers were jammed with enough food to last the three months of an extended expedition. The fuel bunkers were topped off.

  The bills for both would be due in thirty days, Thomas had told him.

  Connie Alvarez-Sorenson, the research vessel’s first mate, as well as Sorenson’s first mate, had gone out and rented thirty videotapes. Just in case it got boring, she had told them. Okey Dokey had a fresh supply of T-shirts, sweatshirts and coffee mugs, just in case it got boring, he said.

  Bucky Sanders, one of the radio operators and the shipboard electronics technician, assured them that all the exotic radio gear he shared with Paco Sanchez was in A-one condition.

  All of the crew members were stowing fresh clothing in the lockers of their accommodations in the hull decks and main deck. Even with the guest cabins on the bridge deck, it was going to be crowded for this voyage. Final packing had people running back and forth to the warehouse, toting cardboard boxes, battered valises and paper sacks full of tacos, rellenos, fried chicken, hargow, dim sum, potato chips, dips and anything else that was not part of the
galley menu.

  The vessel was docked alongside MVU’s warehouse, bathed in light from the warehouse, the lamp posts on the pier, and the floodlights mounted in the antenna rigging and on either side of the bridge. She appeared pristine in her white paint, with the diagonal yellow stripe swooping up the side of the superstructure. Interior light poured from the bridge windows and the portholes in the superstructure and hull.

  On the aft deck, DepthFinder was snugged down against her rails, covered with a yellow tarp. Atlas, one of the small recovery robots, was secured next to her on the starboard side.

  “Sneaky Pete?” Brande asked.

  “We’ve got two of ’em aboard, Dane, along with SARSCAN,” Sorenson said. “Plus, I’ve backed up the spare parts for damned nearly everything, including computers.”

  “Good. How about cable?”

  “We’ve got two five-thousand-foot reels of multichannel fiber-optic.”

  “Scuba and deep-diving gear?”

  “In prime working order, though I doubt that we’re going to go after this reactor with fins.”

  “No, but I like to be prepared for anything.”

  They took one last tour of the deck, then stopped next to the gangway. Sorenson signaled Fred Boberg, his helmsman on the bridge, and Boberg sounded the air horn twice. It sounded forlorn in the night.

  The stragglers emerged from the warehouse and climbed the gangway. Two seamen raised the gangway with the small crane, stowing it on top of the superstructure, behind the guest cabins and next to the eighteen-foot Boston Whaler.

  Kaylene Thomas came running out of the warehouse, her arms wrapped around a stack of journals and books.

  Brande made the three-foot drop to the pier, met her, and relieved her of her books.

  “Did Okey remember to bring his library?” she asked.

  “I think so. He’s got a lot of reading to do. But what are you doing?”

  “With this much time at sea, I’m going to start reorganizing.”

  Brande had not yet announced to the others his decision to relinquish his executive position in favor of Thomas. Despite his glibness at the time, it had come hard. It was like giving up a child he had sired, reared, and nourished.

  And then, to his complete surprise, he had felt only relief. Now he could chair a meeting occasionally and spend his time fund-raising or chasing for gold ingots and bronze breastplates. Omit the damned paperwork he hated.

  What had come almost as hard to him was admitting to Thomas that he needed her. It might have been his stubborn Swedish heritage — shades of his grandfather — but Brande found such admissions tough to make. And having done it, he again found relief. And he found he was seeing Rae Thomas in a different way. Not one he could describe, particularly, but she was different somehow.

  Or maybe he was different. He would have to sort it out sometime.

  The Orion’s diesel engines cranked several times, then caught, and a dash of blue smoke escaped from the stern exhaust ports.

  Brande handed Thomas’s books up to Sorenson, then said, “Up you go.”

  Grasping her waist, he lifted her to deck level, and Sorenson towed her aboard.

  “Mel, you take care. You’ve got the new president of Marine Visions aboard. Be nice.”

  Under the bright lights, he saw Thomas blush.

  Sorenson said, “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “It’s about time, Dane.”

  “My grandma used to tell me that frequently.”

  Everyone seemed to know more about it than Brande did, he thought.

  Sorenson climbed the outside ladder to the bridge wing, then slipped inside.

  Brande walked forward along the pier and began releasing the docking lines from their bitts. A seaman named Rogers, on board the ship, stayed with him, pulling the lines aboard. They turned and went aft, releasing those lines also.

  “Shut off the lights when you close up, Dane,” Thomas called to him as the Orion engaged her propellers and slipped away from the dock.

  “Quit thinking about the cost of electricity,” he called back to her.

  He stood alone under the lights of the dock and watched until the Orion sailed out of his view around the point of the Commercial Basin.

  *

  0122 HOURS LOCAL, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  “Why is it that progress must always follow tragedy?” Curtis Aaron asked the crowd that surrounded the Ford pickup that was his stage.

  The mob, about three hundred strong, did not know. They were waiting for him to tell them.

  “Fifty thousand die, and then we learn we should have gotten out of Vietnam earlier.”

  “YES!” they yelled.

  The bullhorn was heavy, and Aaron lowered it to rest on his left hand during the responses. He was a Vietnam veteran, and he was probably the only one on the pier. His speeches always made frequent reference to the debacle in Southeast Asia.

  “A hundred-year-old forest crashes to the ground in Washington, stripping bare the mountainsides, and then we try to recover by planting seedlings that are washed away in the winter snows. A century down the tubes!”

  “YES!”

  “The oil spreads like thick, deadly blood on the pristine waters of Prince William Sound, killing everything in its path, and then we learn that we need more stringent requirements for tankers and for their operators.”

  “YES!”

  “How many human beings, seals, cormorants, salmon, sea gulls, whales, and beaches will die before we learn that Nature herself is better suited to governing her flocks?” Aaron asked, more conscious of the rhythm of his deep voice magnified by the bullhorn than of the order of his list.

  “Too goddamned many!” somebody yelled, probably Dawn Lengren.

  “TOO DAMN MANY!” the crowd echoed.

  Aaron let them chant for a while. He smiled at them and looked around. Mark Jacobs of Greenpeace stood leaning against a pier railing, looking back at him. Jacobs had spoken to the crowd earlier but, Aaron thought, with less conviction than was called for in light of the developing news reports. Aaron frequently chided Jacobs for the soft stances that Greenpeace took.

  It was more than news reports, of course. Rumors were flying with the agility and speed of F-15 Eagles. The meltdown had already occurred. Fish were dying by the millions, washing up on the beaches. Fishermen had been quarantined. Supermarket chains had already banned the sales of seafood products from Pacific waters.

  Rumor or fact, people were frightened. How often could he or Mark Jacobs assemble a crowd this large on the Santa Monica Pier at one o’clock in the morning?

  They were an odd lot. A few fishermen, a few freaks that had drifted in from West L. A. and Hollywood, a large number of beach bunnies and surfers, some boating people — judging by their clothing and the pseudo gold braid on the bills of their baseball caps — and a couple of cops. The cops appeared a little nervous as they eyed the weirdos and the louder protesters, and they did not chant along with the crowd.

  A chilly wind was blowing in from the sea, breaking against his throat above his navy blue windbreaker. A couple of ships were steaming several miles offshore, but other than that, there was not much marine activity. A fairly steady stream of cars moved along Pacific Avenue. Aaron wondered if their occupants had come down to gawk at the contaminated water.

  Donny Edgeworth, Ocean Free’s secretary-treasurer, was at the fringe of the mob, talking on Ocean Free’s only cellular telephone. Edgeworth was a skinny kid with hair so golden it looked green. He was not really a kid, being thirty-five years old, but his slight frame and rampant acne gave most people that impression.

  As the chanting died away, Aaron lifted his bullhorn again and said, “And now … ”

  “AND NOW…”

  “They’ve done it again. Defying Nature, with no concern for the consequences, the powers that be have created yet another catastrophe”

  “YES!”

  “Doing their best to destroy what God and Nature
have provided for mankind.”

  “YES!”

  “When will they learn to leave alone that which history and fate and nature have given to us?”

  Wrong question, or form of question. The mob did not know how to respond.

  “Leave it alone!” Aaron said into the mouthpiece. The three words issued from the bullhorn in volume and were blown away by the breeze.

  “LEAVE IT ALONE!”

  Edgeworth pushed his way through the throng of people as they intoned their new message and craned his turkey neck up toward Aaron.

  “LEAVE IT ALONE!”

  Aaron leaned down, gripping the rail of the pickup bed. “Curtis, San Diego just called. The Orion has left her port”

  “I knew it! Brandeʼs involved. Was he aboard?”

  “I don’t know. Becky was too far away to see much.”

  “Go find Dawn. I think we’d better trail along on this party”

  Edgeworth’s face showed his alarm. “I don’t know, Curtis. You think … uh, you think it’s safe?”

  “Who knows, Donny, boy? But we’ve damned sure got a commitment — to ourselves, and to people like these here — to do what’s right. Get going.”

  Aaron stood upright and used the bullhorn to reinforce the “Leave it alone!”

  The mob voice regained strength, and he slipped over the side of the truck and walked away with that proud chant in his ears.

  When he gave a thumbs-up to Mark Jacobs, Jacobs did not acknowledge it.

  *

  0250 HOURS LOCAL, 36° 4' NORTH, 170° 44' EAST

  Mikhail Gurevenich had attempted to sleep for a couple of hours, but unsuccessfully. Illogically, he tried to attribute his restlessness to the fact that they had crossed eastward into a new time zone, but underneath, he knew that his anxiety about what he would find at the end of his journey was increasing steadily.

  Also, he suspected that his inability to confide in anyone else — his second in command, even the asinine rookie officer, Lieutenant Kazakov — relative to his concerns and the terrible secret he carried heightened his unease. He kept wishing he had not decoded that second message, or that the message had not ordered him to maintain his silence.

  Gurevenich gave up on his nap, rolled out of his narrow bunk, and dressed in a fresh uniform. Leaving his cabin, he prowled through the claustrophobic passageways of the submarine. It was mostly quiet. The high revolutions of the propeller shaft created an irritating whine and a slight vibration in the deck. Except for the crew members on watch, and two enlisted men playing chess in their mess, the men were in their bunks, snoring or dreaming or both. They had nothing to worry about, though certainly the various rumors regarding their high-speed transit would have rippled by now into a thousand even more various rumors.