Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “There’ll be a considerable drag,” Don said. “We can’t get energy for nothing.”

  “This will handle the stress,” Stefanato said.

  “What about the stress on the platform with all four impellers on the same side? The rig’s going to heel over.”

  “Seventeen degrees at full load,” Stefanato said. “We’ll pump water into the two up-current legs, which’ll even things up a bit.”

  “Have you worked out the torsional loads something like that will put on the main deck?” Don pushed.

  Eve realized that he had become just as big of a worrier as she was. She’d never noticed it before, maybe because she’d been so wrapped up in her own world, but now she could see that he was actually tense. Maybe even a little frightened that they had come so close, that so much was at stake, that if anything went wrong, the slightest thing, the entire project would go down the drain.

  Stefanato smiled tightly. “Listen to me, son. You’re a scientist and I’m an engineer. You stick to your lab upstairs and let me take care of the engineering on my rig down here, and it’ll all work out.”

  Don took a shuffling step forward, his aggressive don’t-give-me-any-shit expression on his face, but before Eve could put out a hand to stop him, Defloria broke in.

  “Herb is one of the company’s best construction engineers, and he knows oil platforms top to bottom. There’s no one better. I’m trusting my life and the lives of my crew to his judgment.”

  “This is our rig now, and let’s just say that I’m a skeptic,” Don said.

  “And let’s just say that Vanessa is the company’s rig until we reach Florida and turn it over to your team,” Defloria said mildly. “But if you have a problem with that, Doctors, I suggest that you call the company.”

  Don started to say something else, he clearly wanted to press the argument — no simple mechanical engineer was going to tell a man who held two Ph.D.s anything — but this time Eve was able to hold him off.

  “Accept my apologies Mr. Stefanato,” she said. “We’ve been working on this project for a long time and there’s a lot at stake for us, including the careers of everyone upstairs who’ve stuck with me despite the nearly universal criticisms we’ve gotten from just about every direction. We’re all a little touchy.”

  And Stefanato came down and he nodded out toward the flotilla. “And that crap isn’t helping anyone’s nerves,” he said. “But trust me, when we’re finished Vanessa will hold up to the stresses — torsional as well as traverse, compressional, and repetitive. If you want to stop by my office I’ll show you the CAD programs I used, and the communications I had with GE’s chief engineer on your impeller project, plus with the guy who designed the things, and with my boss, the VP of the company’s engineering division.”

  Don actually grinned. “I guess I can be a shit sometimes,” he said. “Sorry.”

  Eve almost wanted to reach out and hug him. He had pressed his charm button, and even shook Stefanato’s hand, and yet a little part of her was slightly disappointed because his charm was fake. She didn’t think the engineer could see it, but Defloria had and he remained cool.

  “Is there anything else?” he asked Eve.

  “Will this be finished by the time we get to Hutchinson Island?” she asked.

  “In plenty of time,” Defloria said. “Actually the work is going faster than we thought it would. No accidents yet.”

  “Do you expect something like that?”

  “This is an inherently dangerous environment. Things happen.”

  And all of a sudden Eve’s remembrance of that day on the Big G when the cable parted was painted vividly in her mind’s eye; the blood and gore all over the deck, the look of resignation in the drowning crewman’s face, the hypoxic flashes of light in her head just before she surfaced, and the Fox news producer’s reaction.

  “We’ll try to stay out of your way as much as possible,” she said.

  Defloria looked at her critically. “When’s the last time you got any sleep?” he asked, not unkindly.

  “Not much since we came aboard,” Don answered for her.

  “Accidents happen to tired people. Maybe you should get some rest. Our work will go at its own pace, and there’s not much for you to do until we get to Hutchinson Island.”

  Eve wanted to protest, yet she knew that Defloria was right, and she finally nodded. “Let’s take tonight off,” she told Don.

  “I’ll let them know,” he said. “Come on, I’ll walk you back to your room.”

  And Eve was even more exhausted than she’d realized until this moment, so tired she couldn’t object to what she knew was a chauvinistic gesture on Don’s part, and she went with him, hand in hand almost as if they were schoolkids or lovers, almost meekly.

  Back inside, out of the wind and noise from the flotilla, she shivered. Krantz and everyone else she’d ever worked for or with had told her that she was too intense for her own good. That she worked so fast — like a maniac sometimes — that she was bound to make mistakes. Science was supposed to be slow and steady. Her rejoinders from the beginning had been simple: Check my data. And it had shut most of them up most of the time.

  But now she realized that she had been pushing herself too hard, since the accident aboard the Big G and especially since Kirk McGarvey had shown up at her side in Hutchinson Island and since Oslo. Her project had become more than a scientific experiment. Practically every eye in the world was turned her way. Academics, engineers, big oil, the media, and even the religious right, most of them either expecting her to fail or wanting her to fail. They’d given her enough rope with which to hang herself, and they were sitting back now waiting for her to drop.

  Upstairs at the door to her room, she hesitated for a few moments, swaying on her feet, but then she was in Don’s arms, and he was kissing her and she was kissing him back passionately, their hands all over each other. And she couldn’t stop, she didn’t want to stop, except that for a brief instant when she looked up into Don’s face she saw Kirk McGarvey’s green eyes, but it was just a fleeting feeling, like suddenly jerking awake in bed because you had the sensation of falling.

  They went into her room, not bothering to lock the door, pulling their clothes off and falling into bed, their bodies intertwined tightly, and they made love. Fast and with more passion than love or any feeling of tenderness; just two people, hungry nearly to the point of starvation for a lifesaving connection, for the sexual release, with no expecations for any sort of a future.

  Afterwards, Eve vaguely remembered Don leaving, getting out of bed, and until he covered her with the sheet and blanket, a sharp feeling of coldness, but she never saw him get dressed nor did she hear the door close when he left.

  * * *

  Don went over to the dining hall and had a couple of pieces of surprisingly good pizza and a couple of Cokes, then went up to the control room where he joked around with everyone with an easy smile that people always seemed to respond to. They worked for a couple of hours, mostly calibrating their monitoring equipment and setting up the data link between their onboard computers and the mainframe at the lab back in Princeton.

  “Where’s the boss lady?” someone asked at one point.

  “She was dead on her feet, so I put her to bed,” Don told them.

  “She was practically asleep on her feet all afternoon,” Lisa said.

  And he glanced out one of the windows. It was getting late and although the drizzle had stopped, the wind across the deck was twenty-five knots with higher gusts, yet Defloria’s crew had begun work on the second tripod, and by the looks of it they would be at it all night. Stupid bastards, he thought.

  “Let’s call it a night, guys,” he said turning back. “I think we all need some R and R. Back up here at 0800.”

  “Slave driver,” one of the techs said, but they laughed tiredly, switched off the equipment they’d been using, and trooped out laughing and talking, ready to party at least until midnight or later. They’d deal with 0
800 at 0800. Science could be fun.

  He checked his and Eve’s e-mails one last time, but nothing pressing had come in, only a couple of bon voyages from fellow faculty members, and he switched off the lights and went back to the windows to watch the work on deck and Schlagel’s flotilla still circling the rig and tug.

  He’d been attracted to Eve from the moment he’d read the first paragraphs of her “Studies on the Problems of World Energy Needs in the Face of Finite Reserves of Fossil Fuels and the Predicted Lack of Commercially Viable CO2 Capture and Sequestration Technologies.” Like a moth to an open flame, he thought, with a lot of anger and resentment. Her project was his. He’d come up with the solution first, well before she’d published her first paper in Nature and later as a less technical popular science piece for Scientific American. But his had been much broader in scope; energy from the ocean currents, in his estimation, was only the first step. Energy would have to be produced wherever possible — inland from the winds, in a large measure because even the U.S. did not have a national power grid. Electricity produced off the East Coast could not be exported much beyond the Ohio River, and certainly not as far as California. And solar power would have to be produced in the Southwest desert, and in the Gobi and Sahara and Australia’s Great Victoria, Chile’s Atacama, and Antarctica’s five and a half million miles of arid landscape — at least during the summer months when the sun was shining.

  But Eve had NOAA’s backing, while despite his superior education he’d become nothing more than another of her postdocs, and when the time came to hand out grants and recognition, it was Eve who’d received the Nobel, and it was she who’d been given Vanessa Explorer and the promise of one billion dollars from the bank in Dubai.

  Christ, it rankled. Right now to the soles of his feet, gnawing, pulling, dissolving his gut, making him fuzz out so badly sometimes that his default mode had become a smile so broad it crinkled his face at the corners of his eyes, when all he really wanted to do was lash out. Pull out a pistol and shoot someone, or beat the bitch to death with a baseball bat.

  “Doctor Price,” someone said behind him.

  Price, caught totally off guard, turned away from the window so fast he almost lost his balance and he forgot to smile. “Who the fuck are you and what are you doing up here?”

  “My name is Boris Gurov, and I was sent here to become your new best friend. Can we talk?”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Otto Rencke had been in a blue funk for the past four days, so totally wiped out that he’d made no progress in the search for the contractor, and so contrary because of it, that his wife Louise threatened to take Audie and go back to Wisconsin to visit her parents until he came to his senses. But a telephone call from Eric Yablonski at eight this morning just before he was about to leave for Langley had changed everything.

  Afterwards he’d stared out the window for the longest time, until he became aware of his wife watching him, and he smiled and began hopping from one foot to the other. “Oh, boy,” he said. “I just talked to a genius.”

  Louise was grinning, and the baby clapped her hands. “And what did he tell you?”

  “How to find our contractor.”

  “Who’s your genius?”

  “Eric Yablonski from the NNSA,” Otto said, and he tapped his fingers against his forehead in frustration. “And it was right there in front of my big nose all the time. But I was so wrapped up in letting the programs do the work that I forgot to do my own. Machines are incapable of thinking out of the box.”

  Louise was enjoying this. “Pun intended?”

  And Otto looked at her for a moment until he got it. “Pun indeed,” he said, and he went to get his jacket, then came back to the kitchen and explained what Yablonski had come up with.

  “I’ll make a couple of calls,” Louise told him. Until last year when she’d taken an early retirement she had been chief of imagery analysis at the National Security Agency, and she still had a lot of contacts at Fort Meade.

  “Send it to the Dome,” Otto told her.

  * * *

  Eric was waiting for him at the visitors center around noon and they shook hands. “I’ve been wanting for a long time to meet you face-to-face. It’s a rare honor, Mr. Rencke.”

  Otto was embarrassed, and he just nodded his head. “Anyway, my name is Otto, and you have a hell of a rep yourself.”

  “Nothing like yours.”

  “Well, I didn’t come up with the solution,” Otto practically shouted and the three security officers behind the bulletproof glass looked up.

  “Everything okay, Mr. Rencke?” one of them asked.

  “Nope, ’cause I just met a guy smarter than me. But I’ll survive.”

  And it was Yablonski’s turn to be embarrassed.

  Otto got a visitor’s pass and drove Yablonski up to the OHB where he parked in his underground slot, but instead of taking the elevator up to his third-floor office he led his guest through a couple of security checkpoints on the other side of the garage, then down a long tunnel that ran beneath the main entrance and the circular driveway.

  “When did it finally hit you?” Otto asked.

  “I was dreaming about the oil rig and how I would sabotage it, if that were my assignment,” Eric said. “I mean that may be a big assumption, but it’s something to start with.”

  “Not such a big assumption. Mac and I looked down that path but neither of us came up with what you did.”

  “I figured that our contractor was probably in some military somewhere — from what we know and guess, most likely South Africa — and standard operating procedure for those guys is planning and training. Either he got the use of an oil platform sitting out in the Persian Gulf — assuming he’s been hired by someone with connections to OPEC, or at the very least someone in the oil markets — or he got the blueprints for Vanessa Explorer and had a mock-up, or at least a partial mock-up, built out of plywood and two-by-fours.”

  “That’d be a big construction project. Out in the desert somewhere.”

  “Saudi Arabia?” Yablonski asked.

  “One of the Royals might be funding the op, but they wouldn’t put something like that on Saudi soil. My guess was Syria or Libya. But if it’s there, it would have to stick out like a sore thumb, even if it was camouflaged.”

  “Where are we going, by the way?” Yablonski asked.

  “The Dome,” Rencke said. “Have you heard of it?”

  Yablonski was impressed. “Jesus,” he said. “Only rumors.”

  “Well, you wanted to know if we’d spotted anything interesting in the past thirty days or so, and I think we’ve come up with something in the Libyan desert about six hundred klicks southeast of Tripoli.”

  Nearly a hundred yards down the bare concrete-walled tunnel they came to another security door, where Rencke had to submit to a retinal scan, and inside a small anteroom an armed security guard, who’d monitored their progress from the parking garage, looked up from where he was seated behind a small desk. Getting beyond this point required visual recognition; only people the security guard on duty personally knew could pass.

  “Good morning, Mr. Rencke. Your operator arrived fifteen minutes ago.”

  Otto and Eric signed an electronic reader, and the security officer buzzed them through into a long corridor and then through another security door into a large dimly lit circular room with stadium seating for two dozen people under a domed ceiling much like the ones found in planetariums. A projection device with several lenses was built into a platform in the center of the room, computer-controlled by an operator in a booth in the rear. Each seat had its own monitor and keyboard to control the presentation if the material being displayed were too sensitive to be shared by an operator.

  “Good morning, Mr. Rencke,” the operator’s voice came from speakers. “Are we ready to begin?”

  “Yes, please,” Otto said, and he and Yablonski sat down.

  The room lights dimmed further, and overhead a 360-degree image of what appe
ared to be a training base of some sort in the middle of a desert appeared on the dome. The image was so startlingly clear, almost 3-D, that they felt as if they were actually there in person.

  “It’s a former Libyan army desert warfare training base at Al Fuqaha’,” Otto said. “But Gadhafi rents it out from time to time to anyone whose cause he finds worthy, and whoever has the most Western currency.”

  “It looks deserted.”

  “You’re seeing satellite images from sixty days ago,” Otto said. “But watch.” He touched an icon on the monitor.

  The static daytime image began to move, shifting from sunlight into dusk and finally full night in which the view changed to an infrared mode in which anything mechanical like a car or truck engine or an animal that emitted heat would show up. But no heat blooms appeared anywhere.

  Otto sped up the progression from day to night to day until ten days later when four trucks showed up in the middle of the night, and two dozen men began erecting what looked like circus tent poles over which, just before dawn, they draped a mesh fabric.

  “Camouflage netting,” Yablonski said. “But the size of it!”

  Otto stopped the image just after the sun came up when nothing was visible to the satellite except what appeared to be an expanse of empty desert, fifty or sixty meters on each side.

  “Plenty big to hide a mock-up,” Yablonski said. He was excited.

  “That’s exactly what happens over the next thirty days,” Otto said, and he moved the image forward. A steady stream of trucks and workmen arrived by night, unloaded what appeared to be construction materials that they placed beneath the netting, and were gone each morning an hour before dawn.

  The trucks and workmen stopped coming after a month, and the camp remained deserted for nearly a week until a pair of small army trucks showed up one afternoon and disappeared from view beneath the netting. Otto slowed the image at nightfall, where the heat blooms of several people showed up, at least two of them brighter than the others.