Lofton climbed through the hatch and said, "Everything is stowed down below." He watched her struggle with the spinnaker for a moment. "Why not wash and dry it?"
"How?" She stood back, her hands on her hips.
"Make a bathtub. Just plug the drains, leave the chute on the sole, and fill the cockpit with three or four inches of fresh water. Then you raise it upside down. Here, I'll help you."
"All right," she muttered.
Lofton, working fast, spread the saturated spinnaker over the cockpit deck, duct‑taped the drains and began flooding the chute with fresh water from a dockside hose. He said softly, "Sorry it got wet, Bonnie. Had to dump it in the water to stop the boat." He checked his watch.
"It's OK. It's long overdue for a wash, anyway. Look, you're in a hurry. I can finish up here."
"I'll raise the chute before I go." He smiled.
"Okay."
Lofton connected the spinnaker, hoisted it, cleated the halyard, and dashed below for his seabag. He vaulted off True Blue, eased past Bonnie, and had barely made the gangway when a small patch of wind uncurled the free clew. Suddenly, the spinnaker shuddered. The halyard shackle spun. With a loud snapping flutter, the chute unfurled and flagged out behind True Blue. A cloudburst shed thickly on Bonnie and she ran shrieking to the safety of the main dock.
He turned to see Bonnie whip water off her hands. She took off her glasses and riveted Lofton with a quick glance. Her eyes. She didn't look at him or through him. Bonnie looked into him. Deeply.
He walked back and stopped before her.
Bonnie clutched her glasses with both hands. Her hair was soaked, rivulets ran down her cheeks and chin and dripped onto her drenched windbreaker. Her lips were pressed tightly as she wiped thick lenses with a wet handkerchief.
Suddenly it wasn't funny to Lofton. Somehow, not with this woman.
"Bonnie, I..."
She nodded slightly.
"I'm sorry, I thought you knew," he lied. He paused as she smeared at her glasses, her head down. "That was awful, I should have told you to move forward. I'm really sorry."
Bonnie Duffield raised her green eyes, squinted to a decent focus, and offered her right hand. He took it.
"Thank you for your help, Mr. Thompson. My father got his first place. He's happy. So am I. And I hope you are, too." A thin smile, water dripped inside her collar. True Blue's spinnaker flapped lightly overhead as it dried. Bonnie dropped Lofton's hand, walked back to True Blue, and disappeared down the main hatch.
Lofton stopped at Anderson's boat and said his thanks and good‑byes to Butler and his friends.
Butler stuck his cigar in his mouth, then pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, "Here's my card. Let me know if you want to ride with us again, Matt."
Lofton pocketed the card, shook hands again and walked up gangway twelve toward the parking lot. He turned for one last glance at True Blue.
Bonnie Duffield stood in the aft cockpit shaking the spinnaker to help it dry. She looked quickly at Lofton, then up to her sail, pulling the luff tapes in rapid jerks.
He almost stopped, but the thoughts flashed: Brutus, Petropavlovsk. He walked quickly up the gangway ramp.
As Lofton checked his watch and started walking the sun dropped toward downtown. He'd left his Audi in the opposite corner of the Long Beach Marina, at least a half mile away.
He was relieved that his mind felt clear. He checked through the next step in his plans. Brutus had to be provisioned. Three weeks' foodstuff should do that. The difficult part would be finding jet fuel.
He turned the bend at the quay wall, passing strollers and hand‑in‑hand couples enjoying the sunset. Two kids in knee‑length surfing trunks whooshed by on skateboards. One jostled Lofton's seabag as they pushed on and looked back with pubescent laughs. The parking lot was emptying. Weekenders headed home for a quiet Sunday evening in front of their VCRs. Then to work tomorrow, and the freeways, and the gridlock. How he wished he had that luxury.
But, in one sense he was free now. Renkin had impeccable credentials as a deputy director on the national security council with access to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI, Interpol, and all their damned innumerable clandestine offshoots, but he still couldn't use the regular Navy. That would make it too public. And, if the regular Navy wasn't notified, then Lofton had the world's oceans to hide in, the Pacific at least, until he decided what to do.
Lofton had seen Renkin's decrypted dispatches and had figured most of it. Ivy Bells, the lat/long coordinates, Petropavlovsk, the Truman's route, dates and times. Code names leaped from Renkin's files: PARALLAX and PITCHFORK. He had to contact them.
Lofton spotted his Audi's nose four hundred feet ahead, where three days ago he'd tucked it behind a dumpster two rows from the quay wall. Lofton crossed the first row and wove into the second. A car started, drew up behind him, and stopped. Lofton stepped aside to let it pass, then turned and‑‑Kirby! Lofton's mouth opened when he saw Kirby's scowl behind the wheel of his black Mercedes 560 SEC. Kirby beckoned with his left hand. The Mercedes's window glided down.
"Brad, get in," he called softly.
"Walt, I can't."
"Now, damnit. Move!" Kirby's voice was a hoarse whisper through clenched teeth.
Lofton checked his Audi, shrugged, walked around the Mercedes, and got in. He shut the door with, "Walt, look--"
"In a minute," Kirby turned in his seat and began backing down the long row. "Fine friends you have."
"What?"
"In a minute. Shut up." He slowly backed against the one‑way traffic, barely missing two girls in a Volkswagen Rabbit convertible. He found the aisle, stopped, then pulled out onto Marina Drive.
"What was that all about?" Lofton asked, looking back.
A grim, silent Kirby dogleged right on Pacific Coast Highway and headed south. "Where's your beard?" he demanded.
"I shaved it off. Is that why you grabbed me?"
Kirby growled, "A great stunt you pulled today, you bastard. I thought it was a joke. Maybe it was. Was that why you dropped out of the race?"
"Walt, I had to."
"Shut up. So I decided to go, anyway. 'Screw Lofton,' I said. 'If he doesn't want to steer his own boat with his partner, then that's his problem.'"
"But--"
"Hell, I know how to drive that boat. I've done it before, if you'll remember. So, I slap together a crew and take off. We have a good time going over Saturday, we get a bullet--"
"Congratulations."
"--then comin' back today I spot my good buddy Lofton on this Ericson 35 nuzzling up to some good‑looking poontang. 'Ah, so that's what this is about,' I say to myself, 'Brad's got this dynamite new broad stashed away he's not telling Nancy and me about. He just wants to dip his wick quietly.'"
"No, that's not what happened."
"Shut up. So, Bandit goes crazy on the way back, we have a lousy spinnaker set and who goes toolin' by in his little thirty‑five-foot boat? The punch artist of the West Coast. At least that's what I thought until I found your car and waited for you."
Lofton ran his hands over his brow. Something was in Kirby's tone.
Kirby continued softly, "I was waiting for you to walk to your car. I parked about ten stalls down. I was going to, hell, I don't know, roar down the aisle, try and scare you, flip you the finger, have a beer, whatever.
"Then I see this car pull up, a white Ford sedan with--and get this--U.S. government plates. One guy gets out, does a recon, then the other gets out, they're both in dark suits and ties."
Kirby banged the steering wheel. "I still don't believe this. One guy is standing lookout; the other guy runs to your car, and the door is popped open in thirty seconds."
"What? It was locked."
"Yeah. Next thing I know your hood is up and the guy is installing a small bundle, half the size of a shoe box, with wires dangling from it."
"My God!"
"Yeah, your God. That bundl
e is now under your hood and those guys are still parked in the hotel lot across the street, watching, waiting for you to go 'poof.'" Kirby snapped his fingers.
Lofton felt his stomach tighten, his head swirled. Renkin. They'd found him, they knew how. Cover the subject's familiar habitats and friends. It must have been an enormous and expensive operation, in so short a time. "Did they see you?"
"I don't think so. I was pretty far away and hiding just like they were, except for a different reason. Now, you and I have seen five-pound bundles like that before, old buddy. Right?
"And, something else, how'd you get to Catalina in the first place? I know you weren't on the Ericson 35 Saturday 'cause we saw 'em come in and grab their mooring last night. Nobody could miss that knockout broad. And you weren't aboard. In short, what the hell is going on?"
"It's involved."
Kirby gave him a sour look. "Brad, this is serious. Talk."
"I think I'm hungry."
"I'll heat up a pizza at my place. Then you talk."
Kirby fell silent as they crossed over the Santa Ana River bridge into Newport Beach. Dusk settled, deep ambers swept over the Mercedes's rich leather, hood ornament reflections gleamed and jinked like--Renkin's glasses. Lofton glanced at his friend. He wore Levi's, one of their red Bandit polo shirts, and topsiders. The last of the sunset glinted off his natural olive skin, now deeply tanned from the weekend. Kirby had had the same butch haircut since they met in SEAL training in 1971. Kirby's lopsided smile, with those impossibly white teeth, had softened some of the edges in BUDS, Basic Underwater Demolition School. But one of the more hardened, ghoulish instructors took personal offense when Kirby failed to crack. He made Kirby camouflage his teeth, along with the rest of his face. Too much of a giveaway at night, he said. He made him put some black crap on his teeth, but only once. A barroom fight with the man nullified any further requirements.
And now, Doctor Walter Kirby, successful Newport Beach orthopedic surgeon, boat partner, and close friend, could be contaminated, permanently, if Lofton told him what had happened.
Kirby drove up to the guard gate on Bayshore Drive and was waved in. Three minutes later he eased the Mercedes into his driveway. The garage door yawned open to his signal. They pulled in beside a jeep Cherokee and stopped. The garage door descended behind them with a dull thud.
Kirby lived alone in a smallish single-story Cape Cod style waterfront house, vintage 1936. He'd renovated it with new wiring, plumbing, and a security system. The kitchen, undersized by modern standards, looked as old as the house but had been modernized with well‑disguised hi‑tech features.
Kirby popped a frozen pizza into the oven and opened two bottles of beer: a Corona for himself and a Carlsberg Dark Elephant for Lofton. Then he sat with Lofton in the breakfast nook, laying the back of his hand on the table and motioning with his fingers.
Lofton's mind spun. What could he say? "Spook stuff. I can't tell you much."
Kirby rolled his eyes, "My ass. You can't talk about it? I'm really proud of you. History will record Brad Lofton as the most patriotic sonofabitch who ever went up with five pounds of C‑4."
They locked eyes. Lofton sighed, "Walt, you saved my life back there. I Know you're trying to help, it's the buddy system, just like our SEAL days. Except for one thing. These guys don't screw around. They don't wear uniforms. Hell, you saw two of them; this time we're not just doing a recon of some Cuban Coast Guard station. Those guys are stalking me on my home turf and maybe now, you."
He glanced out the window and his voice dropped a notch, "I don't want you hurt, Walt, or Nancy either, for that matter. That's why I tried to sneak into Long Beach today. I didn't want anybody to see me."
Silence. Kirby swigged his beer then sat back and waited, his mouth set.
Lofton mulled it over. How much could he really tell Kirby? How far should he drag him into this? That his own life was in serious danger was evident. Somehow he would have to deal with it. If Renkin caught him, they would squeeze it out, he knew, torture or chemicals, one way or the other. They would make him betray anybody he had been in contact with. Walt could die, too.
Brutus. That damned sixty-five-foot floating turd. Why had they chosen him to do their damned spook dirty work? He could have been back in Connecticut working on real submarines. Instead, he was stuck with this seventy-three ton "black project" that had been taken over by Renkin and his boys at the NSC.
Revolutionary, the Navy had said. Jenson Industries was happy to furlough Lofton from the SSN-688 attack class modifications he was working on to take over and prove the X-3 concept. They slapped his back and roared their congratulations. Do it! Go to San Diego, get the project moving, and launch that damned prototype. Think of the prestige, Brad, climb the corporate ladder.
Lofton bit: hook, line and periscope.
He knew many navies had tried long-range minisubmarine programs. The results were limited. The British had crippled the giant German battleship Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord in World War II, but minisubs required a mother submarine for delivery, which burdened valuable assets for limited objectives. After the war, the Allied nations experimented with new power plants to extend the minisub's range and wean them from larger boats. The U.S. Navy built the X-1, which employed a reciprocating Walther cycle engine. Using hydrogen peroxide, the engine had great promise for extended underwater operations, since the fuel carried its own oxygen and the X-1 was not required to surface to feed its power plant with air. They called it an air independent system (AIP).
But the X-1 blew up dockside. People were killed. The fuel was too caustic and too difficult to keep in a pure state. If foreign matter came in contact with the hydrogen peroxide, usually during fueling or handling, it would react--violently. The X-1 was converted to a diesel electric boat, which eventually became a useless hulk and was decommissioned. The Navy was concerned with global operations and large carrier groups, not little submarines with limited capabilities that exploded all the time. They gave up.
But the Navy did inherit the bathyscaphe Trieste and designated it the X-2. She was a success and a propaganda coup, and dove to over 35,000 feet in the deepest part of the world's oceans, the Marianas Trench, in the late 1950s. But strategic planners called the Trieste an underwater elevator. She was only a research vehicle, not a minisubmarine suitable for long-range tactical missions.
Then, in the 1970s, the Navy resumed interest in covert reconnaissance activities. They developed small self-propelled swimmer delivery vehicles, SDVs, for their SEALs. SDVs were housed in special chambers aboard mother submarines for transport to foreign shores where a small group of SEALS would exit for reconnaissance and espionage.
Once again, "mother submarines": valuable assets and personnel were tied up. Proposal requests were issued for new concepts. MIT responded with a technology that had been in use on space vehicles for years: fuel cells. They proposed a design in which one fuel cell could generate an astounding forty-two kilovolts. Six fuel cells linked to a single DC motor and supporting, say, six batteries could drive a fifty-to seventy-foot submersible at twenty-five to thirty knot sustained speeds depending on desired efficiency, for well over 20,000 miles. With a shrouded, five bladed screw, it could have a dash speed of thirty-five knots, which meant batteries would be drained after two hours.
No matter. Twenty-five knots sustained was plenty. Such a vehicle, MIT researchers said, would be extremely quiet, no large grinding pumps, no generators, very little rotating machinery to throw off a sound signature, and compared to nukes, a much, much, lower heat signature. Very stealthy.
The Navy R&D staff sat up...what if?
Yes, what if such a submersible, let's call it the X-3, were mass produced in the sixty foot range with a ten-foot beam, an aluminum hull, an anechoic sound deadening skin in a streamlined, "torpedo" shape? They considered the advantages. Aluminum was elastic, submarines could cycle time and time again from great depths, well over twenty-five hundred feet, without sacrificing watertight
integrity. And aluminum was nonmagnetic, it would help degauss the boat. The anechoic skin would help absorb sonar waves, and the streamlined shape, one without any topside protrusions, including a conning tower, would insure optimum hull speed.
"But," the Navy asked, "what about the fuel cell? What would it burn?"
"Hydrogen peroxide and JP-5," MIT said.
"What? Mix that stuff and jet fuel? Everybody will blow up! We've been there. So have the Brits and the Germans. No thank you."
But the MIT concept prevailed over the old guard. Safe methods had been devised for handling hydrogen peroxide. The main improvement would be in materials; polyfluorinated containers, tubes, and flow control equipment were recommended. Six thousand gallons of the 70 percent solution would be packed in thousand pound Teflon bladders. Sixty bladders would partially surround a four-by-twenty foot access tunnel that ran from the X-3's control room aft to the motor room. Hydrogen peroxide was heavier than water, so that would absorb the lower portion of the fuel area for stability purposes. The upper half would provide tankage for thirty-six hundred gallons of JP-5, which was lighter than water. From there, the fuels would be processed through a reformer, which had decomposers, separators, diffusers, and catalytic plates. Finally, the reformed fuels would be burned in a chamber at only three or four hundred degrees, in the presence of a cathode and an anode, which generated the electricity. An amazing by-product was pure water, tons of it, enough for unlimited cooking, laundry, and hot showers, and excess still had to be pumped over the side.
The interior configuration became a battleground over which engineering group offered the most "elegant solution". Just after his assignment to the program, Lofton insisted on ergonomics, and the X-3 became a shipfitter's nightmare. Taking a cue from NAVAIR, Lofton designed the interior configuration to resemble a fighter plane. The only piece of equipment normal for a ship was a muted Chelsea clock over the galley table. One conning station did it all, with a "glass cockpit," four seven-inch CRTs surrounding a large multifunctioned CRT, taking the place of the innumerable of dials and gauges seen in a submarine. In a deep leather chair on the port side, the pilot had instant access to all readouts and, using foot pedals, joystick, and throttle, could control all aspects of the X-3's movement. A periscope housing above the pilot snapped into place giving him conventional surface views with TV enhancement for the rest of the crew. The electronic equipment and its software was astounding, downsized from the X-3's big sisters. It provided battle management, communication, navigation, seakeeping, power plant, air scrubbing, fuel control, underway repair, and maintenance and artificial intelligence programs. All on five screens.
THE BRUTUS LIE Page 5
