She came in alternately damning a recalcitrant senatorial aide with whom she was forced to have dealings and crowing over the successful completion of another case in which an out-of-court settlement had saved their client the embarrassment of a court appearance. She elaborated on these developments in a keyed-up, stream-of-consciousness flow as she mixed herself a drink at the bar and sat alongside her husband. As she chatted, Isaacs half-listened, nodding and responding with appropriate monosyllables on occasion. Muriel realized he was down and covered for him for awhile, but finally inquired.
“You’re quiet tonight. How was your day?”
Isaacs smiled tiredly at his wife, then looked down at his drink. He sat up and tried belatedly to brush some of the collected moisture off the sofa arm.
He smiled again, more genuinely, at his gloomy forgetfulness.
“I shouldn’t let him get under my skin. McMasters outflanked me this afternoon. A petty move on his part, but I had to put aside a potentially significant project that is only in the early stages. One of my young people was pretty disappointed. She’d put a lot of good work into it.”
“Can’t you go over his head?”
“No, it’s not that kind of thing. He put me on the spot before enough evidence was in to make a rigorous case. That’s one thing that bothers me, though. Now we won’t know. If it is serious, it’ll catch us by surprise later.”
“I don’t suppose you can continue surreptitiously?”
Isaacs chuckled.
“You’ve got too many clients who spend their lives going back on campaign promises. No. It would be hard to do and hell to pay if I got caught. He gave me an order as a senior officer. Even if it’s stupid, I’d be putting my job on the line and jeopardizing a lot of programs of proven importance. The Director would rule against me unless I had an overwhelming motivation for my insubordination.”
Muriel grinned and raised her glass in a mock toast. “So you’re going to eat it?”
He returned the gesture.
“I can assure you I’ve already done so in my most humble and cooperative way.”
Chapter 6
The USS Seamount, out of Pearl Harbor, sailed steadily toward the Bering Sea carrying a cargo of sixteen nuclear- tipped missiles. Her blunt hull cut cleanly through the water at four hundred fathoms, maintaining a steady twenty-five knots.
Lt. J. G. Augustus Washington sat at the controls of the sophisticated computerized sonar, his consciousness merged with the surrounding sea, as it would be eight hours a day for the next three months. Half his mind tuned to the sounds coming through his headset and to the green glow of the twin display screens in front of him. He automatically registered the turning of the screw on a distant Japanese tanker bound for Valdez, a school of whales somewhere to the west, and the anonymous squeals, rattles and clicks that characterize the undersea world. The other part of his mind wandered to his recently ended shore leave, to his wife. His quarterly sessions at sea were rough and lonely for a young woman married only a couple of years, but if she couldn’t be home in Little Rock, Hawaii was not bad duty for her. At least blacks were not the bottom of the heap. There were always the native Hawaiians. And their reunions—oooeee! Almost worth three months of nothing doing. He swore it would be another two weeks before he would even begin to think about sex, then recognized that he had already succumbed and laughed softly to himself.
He began to form an image of his woman standing on the bed in the moonlight, naked and spread-eagled over him when the angry boiling broke forth from the earphones. Tension seized his gut and left his heart pounding. He jerked upright in his seat, his eyes fixed on the brilliant dot on the right hand screen that passively recorded incoming signals. His gaze whipped to the left screen that registered the reflection of the active signals the submarine emitted and saw only the faintest reading.
“Holy Christ!”
His exclamation cut through the cabin, violating the hush of routine.
“What have you got?” inquired the duty officer, moving to his side.
Washington’s eyes remained fixed on the screens before him. He reached to flip on the external speaker and the bizarre hiss filled the cabin. He hit another switch and the right screen shifted to the target Doppler indicator mode. Off-scale! He twisted a knob.
“Somethin’s comin’ at us like a bat outa hell! Five thousand—shit! No!” He looked at the right screen again. “Coming on four thousand meters already—goddamn! I can’t even get a reading on it. Closin’ fast. From directly beneath us! And I can’t even see it in active mode! Sucker must be small!”
“That’s absurd,” retorted the officer, “nothing moves that fast,” but his ears heard the noise and his eyes read the screens; his shaken voice belied the conviction of his words. He stepped quickly to the ship’s phone.
Washington began expertly to assimilate the flow of information from the panel before him. He switched the left screen for a brief moment to the target noise indicator display and mumbled to himself, “white noise, no sign of a screw frequency.” He switched the screen to the target data and track history mode, fed from the computer memory. “Now at three thousand meters,” he sang out. The noise from the speaker grew steadily. The knot in his stomach tightened with each fraction of a decibel. He reached to turn down the volume and spoke over his shoulder.
“It’s not coming right at us. It should pass us about eleven hundred meters off the port bow.”
The duty officer repeated the message to the captain.
They listened, unmoving, as the sound peaked and then diminished slightly with a perceptible change in pitch. Washington noted its passage through the ship’s depth level, headed for the surface.
Abruptly the noise ceased, to be replaced with an almost painful silence as saturated ears tried to adjust. Active dials lapsed into quiescence and the bright blip on the screen disappeared. Washington swiveled in his chair to exchange wide-eyed looks of surprise with the duty officer who reported once more to the captain.
Washington returned his attention to his instruments. Ten, fifteen seconds went by. Slowly he turned up the sensitivity of the device and the volume on the speaker and earphones. Only the routine sounds of the sea issued. After twenty-five seconds the duty officer still stood with the phone clamped in a sweaty hand, but others in the cabin began to shuffle in relief. Washington increased the gain a bit more and concentrated his trained ear to detect any hint of abnormal sound. He systematically switched display modes but found no clue to the thing that had just assaulted them.
With the suddenness and impact of a physical blow, the cabin filled with the sound again. Washington shrieked, ripped off his earphones and slapped a palm over each ear. He slipped off his chair and knelt in a daze of confusion, his body pumped with adrenalin, his ears ringing with an intense hollow echo. Several figures rushed to the sonar console. Two friends bent to Washington. Someone fumbled, then found, the volume control. The frightening hiss dropped to a muted roar and the duty officer was left in the new quiet, shouting hoarsely into the phone.
The noise dropped gradually, and then just before it faded below a perceptible level it ceased abruptly once more. Silence fell in the cabin, broken only by the chatter of the sonar and the quiet moan of the man who remained on the floor, rocking gently, his hands over his ears and his eyes squeezed shut.
Several days after the cancellation of Project QUAKER, Isaacs played a closely fought game of handball with a friend and colleague, Captain Avery Rutherford, one of the senior officers in Naval Intelligence. Rutherford was three years older than Isaacs, but in excellent shape. They split the first four games and went to a tie breaker on the match game. Isaacs scored once and served at game point. After several volleys, Isaacs took a shot in front court. Calculating to catch his opponent off guard, he hit the ball softly to the front wall, but it went a bit too high and gave Rutherford time to cover it. With Isaacs in the front court, Rutherford played a favorite shot that came off the front wall as a lob calc
ulated to land in the rear corner, a troublesome left hand return at best. He then retreated rapidly to center court just behind the service area to await the return, hoping to hear the satisfying silence of a missed shot.
Isaacs knew the other man’s tactics, however, and back-pedaled furiously to cover most of the distance to the left rear corner before the ball left the front wall. This gave him time to plant his feet firmly, eye locked on the descending sphere. The ball bounced on the floor, then off the back wall, nicely clearing both it and the side wall. Isaacs made the shot at hip level, putting into it everything his weaker left hand could muster. The ball rifled cross court, just missing Rutherford’s left knee. It struck almost dead in the corner, the front wall a fraction of a second earlier than the right, two inches above the floor. It skittered once and then meekly rolled across the court to bump gently into Rutherford’s toe.
The sudden denouement caught Rutherford by surprise and he just stared at the ball. Then he scooped it up and turned.
“Damnation, Bob, that was a hell of a shot!”
“Thanks,” Isaacs grinned. “Amazingly enough, that’s just what I wanted it to do.”
They played two more games for exercise, but without quite the fire. Isaacs took the first by a comfortable margin, Rutherford the last.
After the game, they left sweat-sogged piles of gym clothes in front of their lockers, grabbed their towels and stepped into the steam room. They sat on the bench and rehashed their play, each enthusiastically recalling the other’s good points and mixing in an occasional soft-pedaled critique.
They fell silent for a couple of minutes. Then Rutherford swiveled his head and looked at his companion.
“Do you mind a little shop talk, off the cuff?”
Isaacs leaned back against the wall, his eyes closed.
“Of course not, what’s on your mind?”
“Well, we’ve had scattered reports of a strange acoustic phenomenon, sort of an underwater sonic boom. This thing’s been kicking around. Nobody’s done anything about it because no one knows what to make of it. I just wondered whether it might ring a bell with you?”
“No,” said Isaacs lethargically, “I haven’t heard anything about it. We’ve been up to our ears counting screws and bolts in Tyuratam, waiting for them to launch the other shoe. Some kind of explosion?”
“No,” Rutherford shook his head and pinched some sweat out of his eyes, “it’s not localized like that. Something seems to be moving through the water, making a hell of a racket as it goes. It comes from the ocean bottom and apparently disappears momentarily at the surface. Then, it reappears and proceeds back down to the bottom.”
“Some kind of missile, torpedo?”
“Seems like it, doesn’t it? But there’s no indication of any launching craft. Besides this starts from really deep down, miles.”
“How about an underwater volcano, maybe spewing out blobs of lava, or rocks?”
“There’s probably too much drag in the water for that to be possible, but I’d give some credence if the reports were from one spot. They’re not, though. They’re from all over the globe. Several from mid-Atlantic shipping lanes, a few near Japan, a couple from the Sixth Fleet in the Med, one south of Madagascar, another in the Sea of Tasman between Australia and New Zealand. The latest one came from a sub north of Hawaii, that’s why it’s on my mind. A particularly close call, poor bastards thought they were being attacked. Anyway, the thing seems to hop all over.”
The men fell silent. Rutherford leaned over to examine a chipped nail on his big toe. Isaacs had not really been concentrating on the conversation. Now snippets of it rolled around in his head. Suddenly, a surge of adrenalin went keening out of his belly and through his body. His eyes snapped open and, despite the heat, he felt as if someone had just raked a large icy comb down his back.
He sat up and faced Rutherford who still bent over his foot.
“Those reports you just described, they seem to be either north or south of the equator, about equal distances.” He tried to keep his voice casual.
“Oh yeah, I forgot to mention another curious feature. This thing appears at random times, but always near the same latitude, sometimes north, sometimes south.”
“Thirty-three degrees.”
Now Rutherford swiveled his head in surprise.
“Hey, friend, you’ve been holding out on me!”
Nervous energy drove Isaacs off the bench. “Nothing like it,” he said intently, “just slow to make the connection.” He paced the small room randomly, oblivious to his steamy surroundings, his mind racing. “Good lord, in the water, too! What the hell does that mean?”
Rutherford had witnessed his friend’s bursts of intensity before and, failing to understand what had set him off, watched bemusedly as Isaacs moved about, his cock flipping drops of sweat and condensed steam at each sudden turn.
Isaacs stopped in front of him.
“Up to last week we were analyzing the seismic equivalent of your phenomenon. Something’s moving through the Earth, generating seismic waves.”
He sat suddenly next to Rutherford and continued.
“I had some of my people keeping an eye on it, even though we didn’t know what to make of it.”
Then he was thinking out loud.
“The seismic data only told us what was happening in rock. I convinced myself that, whatever it was, it was confined to the Earth’s crust, that the seismic waves were its essence. Now you tell me something about it continues into the water.” He shook his head. “I don’t like it. I don’t like this at all.
“Listen, we’ve learned some things you apparently haven’t stumbled onto yet. This thing is always there, and very methodical. It just goes back and forth, back and forth, always on the same path through the Earth.” He waved his arms. “And then out into the ocean! Shit! No reason to think it doesn’t continue into the atmosphere! No telling how far it goes.”
He leaned back against the wall. “Our problem is that McMasters scuttled our operation, claimed it wasn’t Agency business.” He paused for a moment. “Damn, it’s hot in here! Let’s go someplace where we can do a little serious talking. Better make it your office, since the subject is officially ‘verboten’ on my turf.”
As Rutherford steered his staff car through the prerush hour traffic, Isaacs explained animatedly how his interest in the seismic signal became aroused during his duty at AFTAC. He then outlined the progress Danielson had made, culminating in her conclusion that the phenomenon followed a trajectory fixed in space. They finished the drive in silence while Rutherford ruminated on this new information.
A half hour later they entered Rutherford’s office. Rutherford ordered up the Navy file on the acoustic phenomenon. He sat behind his desk while Isaacs remained standing, rocking nervously on the balls of his feet. Rutherford spoke first.
“Boy, I’m really having trouble absorbing this. I had a notion of a random, infrequent occurrence, and now you describe something punching through the surface like clockwork, every eighty minutes or so. I guess I still don’t get the picture. Tell me again how this fixed motion works.”
“Let me use this globe,” Isaacs said as he lifted a fancy relief model of the Earth off its shelf and put it on Rutherford’s desk. He grabbed a pencil and held it pointed toward the surface of the globe, about a third of the way above the equator. “The thing always moves along a line, like this.” He moved the pencil in and out, parallel to itself, “Zipzip, zipzip. But as the Earth turns,” he spun the globe slowly with his free hand, “the thing always comes up in a different place.” He tapped the pencil rhythmically as he spun the globe, each tap hitting it an inch further on than the last.
“Let me see that,” said Rutherford, reaching for the pencil. He held it alongside the globe so that he could project it in his imagination into the center of the globe. Then he moved it back and forth along its length as he spun the globe slowly, eraser to the northern hemisphere, then point to the southern, eraser to the nor
th, point, south. “Okay, I think I get the picture, but what could possibly do that? Through the center of the Earth? Jesus Christ!”
He jerked his head up as a knock sounded at the door.
“Come in.”
An aide came in bearing a file folder.
“Bob, Lieutenant Szkada. Lieutenant, Bob Isaacs, Central Intelligence.”
Isaacs nodded at him.
“Sir.” The young man placed the folder on Rutherford’s desk.
“That’ll be all,” Rutherford said to him with a note of paternalism.
“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant turned and left.
“Sharp young man, that,” Rutherford confided. “My right arm.” He pulled the file toward him. “Let’s see what we have here.” He extracted a list of reported detections and handed it to Isaacs. Rutherford leafed through the corresponding write-ups, looking for ones that were not hopelessly sketchy.
As Isaacs scanned down the list of sonar reports, he let out a loud exclamation.
“I’ll be damned!”
“What?”
“One of life’s little ironies. Several of these reports are from the undersea arrays of acoustic monitors.”
“Sure, we have those babies all over, bound to pick up something like this. So?”
“That system is also operated by AFTAC. The whole ball of wax was right under my nose, both seismic and sonar data. I’m kicking myself, I was so hung up on the seismic signal propagating through the Earth. I had my people trying to put together a puzzle with half the pieces missing.”
Isaacs threw the list on the desk and pulled a chair around beside Rutherford. They spent fifteen minutes checking the time and position on Earth for each of the reports and converting that data into a projected position on the celestial sphere, to see what stars were overhead. As near as they could tell, it was always the same patch of stars. All the sonar events fell on the path predicted by the seismic data. Trying to estimate whether the influence was precisely at the phase that brought Danielson’s seismic signal to the surface was more difficult, but the evidence they had seemed damning enough.
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