Ultra Deep

by William H. Lovejoy

  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, un
fortunately.”

  “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?”

  The two submersibles had been communicating infrequently on the acoustic telephone, and Drozdov responded from the Sea Lion. “I hear you, Miss Kaylene. What is the coordinate of your return?”

  “Nineteen, fifty-three, ten, thirty-one, Gennadi.”

  “We show only the outline of a large ridge,” Drozdov told her.

  Brande looked up at the search monitor and pictured the bottom mentally. The DepthFinder was a half-mile farther south than the CIS sub, and three-fourths of a mile to its west. SARSCAN had picked up a return to its east side which was probably blocked from the Seeker’s sonar probes by the ridge.

  Something there.

  Hiding.

  “What’s your depth, darlin’?”

  “Twenty thousand-two, Mel. But Okey says we’re on the brink of a trench.”

  “It goes deeper?” Sorenson asked, with some degree of awe in his voice.

  “Okey says, ‘count on it.’”

  Twelve minutes later, Dokey’s voice sounded on the speakers. “Depth two-zero-eight-five-four. Position one-nine, five- three North, one-zero, three one East.”

  Sorenson yelped, “You’ve got it!”

  “Shit, no! What we’ve got looks like the first stage. No second stage, no payload stage.”

  There was a long collective sigh from the people behind Brande.

  The Orion rocked hard to the right, making everyone scramble for balance.

  Dokey said, “That son of a bitch is in the canyon, for sure.”

  *

  1012 HOURS LOCAL, WASHINGTON, DC

  Through the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ben Dele-court, the President had ordered CINCPAC to leave the searchers in the Pacific alone.

  Adm. David Potter had complained about a breakdown in the chain of command.

  The President said, “I don’t give a damn who’s calling the shots, as long as they’re called. Let the people on the scene share command”

  Carl Unruh thought it was as good a system as any other. At least, Brande had discovered some way to get the Russians to cooperate.

  Other than for that little bit of drama, nothing else was going on. The major players were on the scene in the Situation Room, but they were not saying much. The whole mood was somber and defeatist as the final deadline approached.

  Others were optimistic. According to the placards on the easels, the zealous nature of protests and rallies had died away as soon as word got out that the boosters had been found. Some had been canceled, others had waned for lack of interest.

  The display on the electronic board in the Situation Room was now the same as one being generated by someone named Emry on board the Orion. It was being transmitted from Brande’s ship through the RVKane to the CRITICOM satellite network, then picked up by Hawaii and Washington.

  Three pieces of debris. Two boosters and the first stage were shown.

  A curving dotted line showed the beginnings of a flight

  path and three more lines breaking off the first indicated where the boosters and the first stage might have separated from the main body of the A2e.

  Where the dotted line would end was still open to conjecture.

  But they were getting there.

  He kept watching the clock on the wall that was labeled Japan, but which had been reset to keep track of time in the target zone.

  There was not much time left on it.

  A decade before, when Unruh was part of the operations directorate, he had relished action. Always doing something, going somewhere. He thought that maybe Brande was somewhat like the younger Unruh.

  But he was older now. He sat in rooms like this and waited for the actions to take place around him. It seemed like he did not have much control, but he did. He was part of the process that formed the general shape of the actions that would take place. And, distasteful or not, he was good at it.

  He did not think Brande would understand or appreciate that.

  Earlier, after Brande had chewed him out so thoroughly, Unruh had thought about looking Brande up after it was ail over and trying to explain the process.

  Now, he did not think that he would.

  He looked up at the clock mislabeled Japan, and he looked at the three pieces of debris that an electronic map said were crunched deep in the Pacific Ocean.

  There was supposedly a canyon out there, deeper than deep.

  And not enough time.

  Unruh did not think he would ever meet Dane Brande, and he thought that that was going to be his loss.

  *

  0935 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 19' 53" NORTH, 176° 10' 31" EAST

  The Orion was directly above the resting place of the A2eʼs first stage. A hundred yards off her bow, the Timofey Olʼyantsev was fighting to stay on station. Though the Commonwealth patrol ship, at 312 feet, was seventy-two feet longer than the research vessel, she did not have the stabilization of the cycloidal propellers.

  When Brande visited the bridge to check on Connie Alvarez-Sorenson, she pointed out a yacht, dimly seen through the slanting rain, half a mile to the south. “Cartwright says that thing’s loaded to the gunwales with reporters. They won’t leave us alone. On the radio, the Navy’s trying to get them outside the cordon.”

  “Be a shame if we lost them all, wouldn’t it?” Brande said. “I’ll plead the Fifth,” she said.

  “You doing all right up here?”

  “Just dandy, thanks to computers and satellites. We’re not going anywhere we don’t want to go.”

  Brande moved to the right side of the bridge and stared forward through the water sluicing off the windshield.

  Dismal, gray view.

  Kenji Nagasaka stood near the helm, ready to grab if the autopilot let go.

  Alvarez-Sorenson, wrapped in a bulky ski sweater, came over and stood beside him.

  “Worried about her?”

  “What?”

  “Kaylene.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Bullshit, boss. Shows all over you.”

  “You’re the resident expert, Connie?”

  “Might as well be expert at something. Go ahead and bring them up.”

  “Little early, yet,” Brande said.

  “Hey, I’m the acting captain, right? I say, with that weather out there, we need more time.”

  Brande went back to the radio shack and said, “Bucky, hook in with the acoustic, would you?”

  Sanders flipped toggles and handed him the phone.

  “How you doing down there, Bob?”

  “We just reported. Check the s
creen.”

  Mayberry was a little testier now, with some fatigue setting in.

  “I’m not near the screen.”

  “Sorry. Situation the same. We’ve prowled the edge of the canyon, peeked over it a few times. Nothing.”

  “The Sea Lion? You check with them on radiation?”

  “Thirty minutes ago. No radiation count to speak of. They’re on ascent now, to change crews.”

  “That’s what I want you to do, too. Bring it on up.”

  There was a delay while Rae wrestled the phone away from Mayberry. Brande pictured it that way.

  “Not yet, Dane. We’ve still got a couple hours of shift yet.”

  “Now, Rae. Connie wants more time for lift-out. And I want time to install Celebes.”

  “Damn it, I was just getting comfortable. Why Gargantua?”

  “So we’re ready, just in case. With time the way it is, we’ll have to make do with the submersible’s sonar.”

  “All right. Let it be recorded that that’s an unwilling ‘all right’.”

  “So recorded.”

  He waited with the phone in hand until he heard that the weights had been successfully jettisoned, then went below to manage a final inspection of Gargantua.

  He had over three hours to wait, but standing idle was not working for him.

  *

  1120 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 19' 43" NORTH, 176° 10' 23" EAST

  “Everybody below is sick as a dog, Curtis. Don’t you think we should head for Midway?”

  “This’ll pass over, Dawn,” Aaron told her. Besides, he was not sure he could find Midway.

  When he had last talked to Mark Jacobs, earlier in the morning, Jacobs had told him that he was taking the Greenpeace boat to Midway. Aaron might have followed then, if he had known where the Arienne was.

  The radar screen was just a lot of little dots appearing behind the sweep as it rotated. Some dots were brighter than others, but it was difficult to pick out which were true vessels and which were random feedback from the sea.

  He had given Dawn a new heading after deciding that a circle of brighter blips was too uniform to be anything other than ships.

  The trouble was, somehow they had drifted southwest of the main body of ships, and heading back to it, they were taking the swells off the left rear quarter. Not infrequently, huge waves crashed over the stern, swamping the deck.