Ultra Deep

by William H. Lovejoy

  The captain stopped outside the sonar compartment, then slipped through the light-trapping curtain into the red-lit space.

  When the sonar man on duty, Paramanov, looked up, Gurevenich raised his hand to keep him in his seat.

  “Have you heard anything of consequence?” he asked.

  “It is difficult, Captain, when the Winter Storm is traveling at such speed, to hear much beyond the Winter Storm. An hour ago, I detected a surface vessel. I suspect it was a small freighter, headed east. Other than that, perhaps a whale or two.” Paramanov grinned at his own wit.

  Gurevenich estimated they were still some sixteen hours and six hundred nautical miles from the target area.

  “Soon, we will begin to encounter other vessels,” he said. “There may be many of them, and you must be careful to identify them.”

  “Of course, Captain. There is the Russian submarine and the task forces.”

  “I think that there will be others, as well, Paramanov. Take extreme care, for we do not want incidents of international importance.”

  The sonarman nodded, but his expression revealed his puzzlement.

  Gurevenich turned and left the compartment. Now was not the time for disgorging too much information and fueling the rumor mill that propagated itself aboard any vessel.

  He would tell his crew as much as they needed to know, but not sooner than they needed to know it.

  In point of fact, he would like to bare his mind, but he was not certain how his crew would react to the knowledge it contained.

  *

  0430 HOURS LOCAL, 33° 16' NORTH, 120° 47 WEST

  Kim Otsuka, rising early from her bed, went forward to the communications compartment and used the ship-to-shore phone to call the Japanese Consulate. She asked for Mr. Sato.

  When he came on the line minutes later, sounding sleepy, he greeted her in Japanese.

  She replied in her native language. “Mr. Sato, I am calling from the Orion. We are at sea.”

  “At sea. But I thought … ”

  “I feel that my place is with those with whom I have learned to work, Mr. Sato. The chances for our success are much greater.”

  After a short silence, Sato said, “The people at Hokkaido Marine Industries will be very disappointed.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “As will be your government. To disregard such an invitation…”

  “Again, I am sorry. I do not wish to show disrespect, but my value is far greater here.”

  Again, there was a short wait before he spoke. “Yes, perhaps you are correct. I will be talking to you again.”

  *

  0445 HOURS LOCAL, PEARL HARBOR NAVAL BASE, HAWAII

  Avery Hampstead had arrived at the headquarters of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, in the middle of the night, but he was still wide awake.

  He had slept for most of the overwater journey.

  The others in the command center were in varying stages of wakefulness.

  Adm. David Potter, CINCPAC, looked a trifle groggy. Cmdr. Harold Evans, the watch commander, did not appear much better, but Hampstead understood that he had been on duty for twelve hours or so.

  The Third Fleet’s electronic plotting board had been cleared of inconsequential data, like the movement of potentially hostile capital warships. Instead, only the tracks of shipping aimed at 26 North, 176 East were shown. Next to each blip at the head of black lines were black, block letters identifying the ship. A frigate named the Bronstein and a patrol craft out of Midway were already on the scene. Kirov and the rocket cruiser Kynda were heading small task forces, plowing through the seas eastward at flank speed. Bartlett and Kane were headed west as a pair. Three thin orange lines indicated the tracks of the submarines Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Houston. Dotted lines projected forward from each blip intersected right at the target coordinates.

  Technicians milled about in the command center, moving from one console to another, speaking on headsets, keying in new information for the display on their computer keyboards.

  The room was completely enclosed. Hampstead did not even have a decent view of Pearl Harbor.

  A new blip was suddenly displayed on the plotting board. It was a long, long way away, off the coast of California. It was identified as Orion.

  “Hot damn,” Hampstead said. “The Orion checked in, Commander Evans?”

  “Just a moment, Mr. Hampstead.” The officer picked up a phone from the table they were seated at, spoke to someone, somewhere for a moment, then said, “Yes sir. She’s en route to the target area.”

  “As soon as you can, Hal,” Admiral Potter said, “Get in touch with the master. I’ll want to speak with Brande about my objectives.”

  Good luck, Hampstead thought.

  He checked his watch, decided it was almost ten o’clock in Washington, give or take an hour, and picked up one of the spare phones in front of him. He dialed his office.

  “Angie, this is the boss.”

  “What boss? I think they fire you when you don’t show up for work.”

  “I’m working in Hawaii this week.”

  “I’ll have my bags packed and be on the way in fifteen minutes,” she said.

  “Actually, what I need is to have you put all my hot appointments on the back burner.”

  “What about the stuff that’s already on the back burner?”

  “It goes on the backest back burner.”

  “How about your wife?”

  “Fortunately, Angie, I already called her.”

  He brought her up to date on his activities and his plans, and then he told her to screen all of his calls. He wanted nothing forwarded to him that did not pertain to the downed rocket. “So I’m stuck in the office?”

  “You can take long lunches,” he told her.

  Then he called Carl Unruh, who was out of the office, but the call was bounced forward to the Situation Room.

  “Brande’s on his way, Carl”

  “Okay, good. How long?”

  “It’s going to be tight as hell. If I’ve got my numbers right, they’ll hit the area on the seventh.”

  “Jesus. That doesn’t give them much time before meltdown day.”

  “If your experts have their numbers right.”

  “They’re still working on it. The President asked them to re-crunch.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s just dandy.”

  “You didn’t mention the deadline to Brande?” Unruh asked him.

  “To one of his people.”

  “And they’re still going?”

  “Give them some credit, Carl. Marine Visions is loaded with competent people.”

  “Still, you shouldn’t have mentioned the deadlines.”

  “I’m not good with classified crap,” Hampstead said. “I never know why it’s supposed to be classified. You have anything new?”

  “Where are you?”

  “CINCPAC.”

  “You’ve seen the plotting board?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ve got the latest on ship movements. Except, we think there might be a CIS sub or two closing the area. One of our Ohio-class subs got a sonar signature on the Winter Storm. She was going gangbusters for Midway.”

  “I don’t think she can do much when she gets there,” Hampstead said.

  “She can start looking. Hell, that’s why we’ve got subs on the way, too.”

  “I suppose.” The decision to send subs had not been Hampstead’s.

  “Next item, Avery. Half an hour ago, a Candid took off from Murmansk with the Sea Lion aboard. She’s headed for Vladivostok.”

  “What will they put her on?”

  “One of our KH-1 1s got a few pictures of the port. It looks to us as if the Timofey Ol’yantsev is undergoing a quick retrofit.”

  “That’s a destroyer?” Hampstead asked.

  “It’s classified as a patrol ship.”

  “That would probably work in a bind,” Hampstead said. “Do we know if they shipped any ROVs out of Murm
ansk along with the submersible?”

  “No. Then again, they may have some on hand in Vladivostok.”

  “Yes, true. How about the Navy’s deep-diving robot?”

  “They flew it out of England this morning, but I think they’re still trying to round up enough cable,” Unruh said. “Another item. A Frenchman named Henrique d’Artilan, who is on the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, with a group including some of our own Nuclear Regulatory Commission people, is on the way to Hawaii. Weʼve told them to check in with CINCPAC at Pearl. I guess you can tell Admiral Potter that he’s hosting the mission control for this.”

  “He’ll be happy to hear that, I’m sure.”

  Hampstead looked at the plot, visualizing, not only the ships, but aircraft converging on the scene. It was going to be a busy scene.

  “What happens, Carl, when all these people, ships, planes, and motor scooters show up in the crash zone at practically the same time?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are we going to have some arguments?”

  “Hell, Avery, I’d think everybody would cooperate in the recovery.”

  “After setting up a committee, a fact-finding group, and a summit meeting?”

  “I’ll mention the possibility to the august group sitting around here,” Unruh said.

  *

  0840 HOURS LOCAL, 31° 48' NORTH, 118° 12' WEST

  From inside Harbor One, the view of the sea was one of murky twilight. At 600 feet of depth, not many of the sun’s rays penetrated.

  The view was almost unobstructed for 360 degrees. Harbor One’s construction, similar to that of Ocean Deep, was that of an inverted bowl. It was raised on steel pillars eighty feet above the uneven seabed, and the bowl had a diameter of 100 feet. Within the bowl were three decks. The first, or lowest, deck contained engineering spaces, including the highly important electrolysis unit which extracted oxygen from seawater to feed Harbor One’s atmosphere. Chemical filters cleaned the air, and a very efficient distilling plant provided pure drinking water.

  The second deck housed the residential, recreational, sanitary and eating quarters. The top deck, with twenty feet of dome over its center, was an open-space conglomeration of biological, psychological, engineering and oceanographic experiments. Twelve people of the fifteen currently assigned to Harbor One were busily engaged in formulation, testing, or assessment of on-going projects. They hovered over hydroponic tanks, pressure chambers, and computer terminals, performing their complex and, Brande hoped, progressive tasks.

  Federal and state funds supported the projects, flowing through the departments of agriculture, commerce, and education, in addition to universities located in California, Massachusetts, Washington, Florida, Texas and Colorado.

  He had arrived fifty minutes before by way of Voyager, and he had spent his first twenty minutes saying hello to everyone and checking on their projects, then the next thirty minutes bringing them up to date on what he knew of the CIS rocket disaster.

  It was the selected topic of conversation, of course. People who spent a fair share of their working lives on the bottom of the ocean could be expected to be interested in the composition of that ocean.

  At the moment, the interior lights were on, and the exterior lights extinguished, so very little of the sea environment was visible. Outside the dome, scenes were viewed through a blue-gray haze. Two sea bass passed directly overhead, and Brande could see a moray eel sniffing the ocean floor some fifty feet to the north. A bluefin tuna that had hung around for nearly a year and was, quite naturally, named Charlie, coasted along behind the bass.

  To the northwest, the lights of the small dome of the mining project were dimly visible. It was about 200 yards away, and the agricultural project dome was another quarter-mile beyond it. Both of the smaller domes were connected to Harbor One by thick, Kevlar-shielded cables and tubing that rested on the seabed and carried electrical power and communications links. Both of the smaller domes had their own atmospheric and water-distillation plants.

  The larger dome also had a link to the surface, in a Kevlar-shielded fiber-optic cable that rose to a massive, anchored buoy. The buoy sported bells and strobe lights that identified the site of Harbor One to surface vessels and also mounted the radio and satellite antennas necessary to communication between the sea lab and the mainland. Radio waves did not travel beneath the surface very well. They were erratically bent, just as light was bent upon penetrating the surface. For shorter distances, acoustic telephones were adequate for through-the-water conversations, but for long-distance communications, the signals had to be beamed from above the surface.

  To the east of Harbor One, Brande saw what he was looking for. A two-man mini-submarine, devised and built in the San Diego shops by Marine Visions and dubbed Neptune’s Daughter, called Dot for short, was hovering a hundred feet away, above the turbine farm.

  The sub was intended only for chores of less than 1,000 feet of depth. Its two operators worked from lounge seats placed side by side, and had a pretty fair view of their surroundings from within an aircraftlike, thick canopy. Less than twenty feet long, the sub was currently being used as the control platform for a tethered crawler robot the MVU engineers had named Turtle.

  The robot appeared to be a miniature tank. It had a heavy metal body and two sets of rubber-cleated tracks. It crawled along the bottom, guided by the operator in the sub through the Kevlar-shielded fiber-optic cable. There was a small rotatable housing on the top of the body, containing cameras, and there were three manipulator arms mounted to the front of the robot. Each arm had a reach of twelve feet. One arm was designed specifically for cutting and welding operations, one worked like a hand for gripping and lifting, and one had a spinnable wrist. It made short work of installing bolts and nuts. The value of a seabed-crawling robot was found in its leverage — it had footing. Robots that were suspended in the water relied on the power of their thrusters for leverage. It was a basic principle that Brande had learned in a difficult way.

  Both of the new turbines, which spun their blades in the current flowing through a narrow canyon and created electrical current for storage in Harbor One’s batteries, were already mounted on the platform imbedded in the seafloor. It looked to Brande as if the robot was completing the final bolt-down.

  He turned, went back to the center of the dome, and descended the spiral staircase past the residential deck to the engineering deck. The aluminum railing felt damp in his hand. There was always moisture inside the dome, especially on the dome itself, despite the silica-gel filters and the high pressure of the air inside. Electrical heat tapes applied along the ribs of the dome took the chill off, but it was never entirely warm. Sixty-four degrees was all they could currently maintain without putting an undue strain on the turbine-generators.

  Brande could have run a cable to the mainland for power, but the idea had always been to have the sealab operate independently of outside sources, and they were sticking to that philosophy. If he ever shook a spare fifty thousand dollars out of someone’s budget, he would build another turbine-generator and raise the temperature a degree or two.

  The engineering deck was divided into a dozen cubicles, and Brande followed a fiberglass-walled passageway until he reached the administrative office. It did not have a door and he walked in unannounced.

  It did not have a secretary, either, so there was no one to announce him. Brande had never been disposed to hiring secretaries, probably because he did not know how to use them efficiently.

  Andy Colgate was sitting at Rae Thomas’s desk, filling in a log displayed on the computer terminal. When he looked up, he said, “I hope you didn’t find any new leaks, Dane.”

  He almost promoted Colgate to Thomas’s old position on the spot, then remembered that promotions were now part of her job description.

  “Nothing I don’t recall from my last trip, Andy. Are the guys about through with Turtle?”

  “Should be getting close.” Colgate leaned back
in his chair so he could look out toward the mini-sub. When he looked back, his expression changed to one of suspicion. “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “You can’t have him.”

  “I need him, I’m afraid, Andy. You can use Atlas for the final connection work on the turbines. I also need Gargantua.”

  Colgate wiped his eyes with his knuckles. “Gargantua isn’t operational, you know.”

  “I know. We’re going to have to change that situation.” Brande checked his watch. “In about an hour, one of the work-boats will be overhead, and we’ll have to winch both Turtle and Gargantua aboard.”

  Colgate stood up, sighing. He was a big man, and his sighs meant something. “I don’t want you irradiating my toys.”

  “Promise.”

  “I don’t want you irradiating yourself, either.”

  “Another promise,” Brande told him.

  The two of them left the office and walked down the concrete-floored hallway. It was not quite wide enough for both big men, and Colgate trailed behind.

  Skirting the spiral staircase, Brande entered the reception chamber. It was a large triangular area, taking up almost a full quarter of the lower deck pie. Workbenches and large tools lined two of the walls. A thirty-by-ten-foot gap in the floor was enclosed by a similarly sized housing that stood ten feet tall. It was large enough to accept Neptune’s Daughter, which it did regularly. Once the mini-sub was in the chamber, clamshell doors closed beneath her, and air was pumped into the chamber, forcing the water out.

  In the floor near the perimeter wall was a small, circular airlock that mated with Voyager.

  Seated on wooden blocks next to the head of the subchamber was Gargantua. Celebes — the official name of the robot — looked something like a deflated football with a stubby nose. Almost twelve feet long, and eight feet wide, the body was only thirty inches high. He was standing two feet off the floor on his four retractable legs. His shoes were one-foot diameter, steel pads. No one knew why Gargantua had taken on a male persona. Most nautical machines in the English-speaking world carried a feminine reference.