They stared at each other. Borodine finally caught on. "But this must mean Jet stream is compromised, if your CIA is aware of it."
"I don't think so. From what I can tell, they're aware of the code word. But I don't think they know what it means."
"But Ivy Bells?"
"No, they only know the defector is aware of an American listening operation near Kamchatka. That's my interpretation. The name Ivy Bells wasn't used. But Jet stream, your code word, was."
Borodine said, "Then it's possible both operations can continue for a while."
"Yes, I think so. As long as the business on both our ends is taken care of."
"Good. Now, Dr. Renkin. Can we return to the subject of Lofton?"
"I think we should."
"Your reports highlight a very capable engineer who has strong potential for us. But we're vague on his personal characteristics. What is he like? What are his habits? How does he enjoy himself? Have you approached him about working for us, yet?" Borodine's questions were staccato.
Renkin shook his head. "As a transition, I talked to him about working directly for me, but he refused.
"As far as Lofton's personal characteristics, I've found him to be very reliable, intelligent, and a good manager. He works long and hard. He's a bachelor. There was a marriage in 1979. It only lasted two years; they separated. And now, he dates a girl for six or seven months, drops her, and goes on to another. His one hobby is sailing, yacht racing, he does a lot of that. He's half owner of a seventy-foot racing sloop that's moored here in Newport Beach."
Renkin sighed. "But his habits, who is he? I don't know. He has friends, but he lives alone in an apartment near Point Loma. He reads a lot and plays chess."
"Drugs? Alcohol?"
Renkin shook his head. "No, nothing as easy as that. He's just a loner."
Borodine looked into the distance. Renkin's presentation was convincing and it was evident the Lofton succession scheme was finished. Plans had to be made to salvage what was left and keep Lofton from ruining things. Borodine would also have to think of another successor to Renkin when the time came. "He's dangerous."
"You can tell that by looking at my face. Can you take care of him?"
"It's difficult. We've been ordered to cut way down on wet jobs. This is a period of perestroika."
"You needn't remind me. But I still need your assistance." It was the closest Renkin would come to groveling.
Borodine stood again and walked to the large bay window. There was a nook he hadn't noticed where a small fireplace lay nestled among bookshelves. He looked out the window and admired the flowering shade plants. Azaleas, he thought. "You're sure Lofton is coming to our side of the Pacific?"
"Positive. He took my briefcase. He can learn a great deal. And the file says he is proficient in Russian; he would be comfortable putting in to Petropavlovsk before he heads for the CAPTOR site."
"Really?"
"Yes, there were papers in the briefcase that may compel him to contact the defector."
"All right. I think something can be arranged. When do you think he will arrive?"
"We laid a track. The X-3's best cruising speed is thirty knots. That would put Lofton in Petropavlovsk on the twenty-first or early on the twenty-second, that is, if he was able to get a full load of fuel. There was so much confusion. We're not sure if he topped the X-3's tank, because the fuel truck blew up. If he didn't top off he'll need more before he attempts the crossing and we're watching for that, believe me. Carrington has a special interest in him also."
"I believe you." Borodine turned to Renkin and examined him. The bathrobe, the rumpled sheets and bedspread, he couldn't see any sign of legs or feet. Renkin's torso seemed to grow out of the enormous bed.
Borodine put his hands behind his back and limped toward Renkin. "I think it will be rather easy. At least, here is what I shall recommend to Pacific Fleet Intelligence."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lofton's heart pounded as adrenaline surged through his veins. No! He dropped to his knees and blinked his eyes, not believing...and yet... He peeked past the number-three decomposer and aimed the flashlight.
Damnit! Right there on the master control solenoid valve. Rust!
Frantically, he reached for the tool kit, yanked it open, spilling sockets on the motor room's deck grate, and hooked up a long extension to a ratchet handle. He arched his back, reaching for the fuel block.
Who built this piece of junk?
He was less than twelve hours from Petropavlovsk. One thousand feet down in the cold North Pacific, and he'd almost been blown to smithereens. His routine inspection schedule had been primarily to keep busy, he had not expected trouble. Aft in Brutus's motor room, this was to have been his last swing through before he closed the Kamchatka Peninsula. He'd almost missed the problem. Lucky.
He put the wrench aside and stripped to his skivvies, perspiring. It was going to be tricky.
Go easy.
He eyed the aluminum fuel block, finding gall‑like corrosion granules that grew into the master control solenoid valve. There, it had converted to plain rust. It took a half hour to remove the solenoid and jury‑rig a polyfluorinated hose to the hydrogen peroxide fuel block with two stainless steel clamps. In disgust, he threw the solenoid aside. He would eject it after he installed the new unit.
The repair took another two hours and with two more bolts to tighten, he lay on the deck grate and stretched his arm past the decomposer. He aimed the socket, a nine-sixteenths; it seated and slid home. Relaxing for a moment he wiped his brow. The temperature was well over a hundred, both tunnel hatches were clipped open, yet the air‑conditioning system barely kept up.
Tired, almost done.
Soon, the hydrogen peroxide fuel transfer system would be back in shape. After a quick check with the inspection mirror, he could get out of here; dog the hatches, take a shower, and jump in his bunk while the air system lowered the temperature to a comfortable seventy‑two.
The wrench fit perfectly. He twisted the ratchet--
"Damnit!" The wrench slipped off the nut, ripping two knuckles. Try the other side. He rolled to his back, scooted aft, and worked his left hand to the fuel manifold.
Don't touch the decomposer.
It cooked at four hundred degrees inside and was still plenty hot outside. He'd already burned his wrist.
He found the nut, held his breath, and slowly turned the ratchet. It was going to work, it had to. Sweat dribbled into his eyes; he blinked.
Rust! How, he didn't know. Perhaps electrolysis of some sort. If rust, an organic substance, worked inside the solenoid to the valve, it would contaminate the hydrogen peroxide fuel. Then, an irreversible reaction. Auto heat. The fuel, all of it, would become hot and explode--violently. Just a little bit would be enough. He'd seen no warning on the master panel, the damned thermo displays still registered in the green. He'd have to work out an auto‑accelerate detection routine if he ever returned to...to normality.
Lofton shuddered while he torqued the manifold nut. Damn! Why hadn't he thought about corrosion problems in the design phase or even during prototype buildup? It was a materials problem, a fairly simple fix; he should have caught it. His mind wandered back. The Germans had lost a few type XXI U‑boats, which used Walther cycle engines, to auto‑heat. And early postwar hydrogen peroxide torpedoes had been a disaster. One had exploded in a British submarine during dockside trials, killing everyone in the torpedo room. The original American X-1 had blown up dockside, killing three technicians. The problem wasn't the fuel-burning cycle itself, where the energy was converted. It was the fuel storage and pumping systems that caused the problem. Improper handling anywhere along the line could cause a violent and usually lethal explosion.
What else could go wrong? He'd discovered more bugs, more than he would have expected, during this trip. Everything was so damned new. Brutus really hadn't had a proper shakedown before Renkin placed him into service.
Lofton tested the
pressure and read the gauge. Tight enough. He eased the torque wrench off.
One more nut to go. He wiped his brow, then carefully seated the socket. Another sixty seconds and he'd be finished.
"Ow!" Skin on his elbow seared and crackled as he was thrown against the decomposer unit. Brutus leaned hard, his rudder jammed to port. Damn! He hadn't heard the beeper on the control panel. The bow took a sharp down-angle and the minisub went into a corkscrew death plunge
Adrenaline pumping, Lofton yanked his arm free, spun on his knees and grappled at the tunnel hatch. How long? Sixty--ninety--seconds to scramble through the twenty-foot tunnel, lurch to his feet, and dive for the joystick at the control panel. If it was ninety seconds he'd be well below crush depth. Blotto!
Lofton found his knees and lunged through the circular hatch. A foot connected with the rusted solenoid, it bounced and clanked down to the bilge. Later. On hands and knees, he flashed down the tunnel as Brutus wove through his deadly tailspin.
Faster!
Lofton flew out the forward hatch checking the depth gauge over the galley table as he ran: The digits zipped past 2677. Five paces, an eternity. A vent riser flange joint gave a loud clang toward the bow.
Lofton's belly caught the back of the armchair. He leaned over, punched "Override" on the master panel, yanked back on the joystick and chopped the throttle. Lights blinked on the displays; some amber, the rest red. Brutus shuddered. A loud pop, then a resounding thump, aft this time; another flange seating itself. He hoped neither had cracked, otherwise that would be it.
He lurched into the seat as Brutus straightened from his nosedive. Finally, zero angle, then slowly up again.
Depth: 3086. His mind raced the calculation; roughly 1364 pounds per square inch! The bow rose further, speed fell to ten knots. The ballast tanks rumbled, somehow anticipating a casualty. Long ago, the computer should have hit the chicken switches and executed a "blow everything and get to the surface" emergency program. Lofton would have to fix that, too.
He nursed Brutus back to one thousand feet and resumed course. His face and chest were drenched and he paused, letting his breathing return to normal. He punched temperature on the Ship display:
SEAWATER: 44˚ F
INT. ATMOSPHERE: 106˚ F
After ten minutes, he reset `Auto' and allowed the NAV system to resume control.
This was the third time. During the first, he'd been asleep in the pilot berth just before he'd crossed the International Date Line south of the Aleutians. Brutus had gone into a sharp right corkscrew, throwing Lofton from his bunk. On the second occasion, Brutus had jammed into a helical left turn. All three times coincided with a course change on his great circle route, minus one hour. A software bug, a bad chip; he had no idea how to correct it outside of setting a beeper on the control panel one hour before course changes. Lofton shook his head. The beeper tone was too soft to have been heard while he was changing the H2 O2 solenoid valve in the motor room.
He checked the displays, all green, then spent five minutes interrogating Brutus's subsystems: ballast tanks, fuel tanks, through hull fittings, electrical, hatches, valves, piping--on it went.
All OK.
Lofton slumped for another ten minutes trying to empty his head. Was the sweat rolling down his chest and onto what was supposed to be a comfortable leather armchair caused by heat from the motor room or was it that his submarine had nearly penetrated crush depth and imploded like a watermelon being squashed by a bulldozer?
They say you don't drown. Instead, you burn to death. Very quickly. Seawater, under tremendous pressure, enters the hull as fast as a piston thrusts in a diesel engine. The horribly compressed air mixture at the top of the cylinder becomes very hot and incinerates nonmetallic matter--human beings.
Lofton rubbed his chin and studied the plot. Eleven or so hours to Petropavlovsk.
Get going.
Tighten the last manifold nut, shut the hatches, and cool down the main compartment. Then, food. He was hungry. He would eat, take a shower, and get some sleep. He would have to be alert in a few hours so he could quietly transit the Soviet seabed, especially when he closed to within a hundred miles of Petropavlovsk
With a sigh, Lofton heaved from his chair and started aft. He winced at the singed patch of skin on his elbow and looked into Kirby's medical bag. He found a tube of burn salve and rubbed on the ointment. After a quick bandage, he trudged toward the motor room hatch. Brutus arrowed on course 267 at one thousand feet for a headland called Mys Mayachnyy.
Lofton wore a dark blue turtleneck sweater, a clean set of Levis, socks, and dark blue sneakers. He didn't know what the day would bring but, he chided himself, this wasn't Southern California, it would be cold topside. If Brutus's navigation system had been accurate, he should be about ten miles due east of Mys Mayachnyy. A large bay, Avachinskaya Guba, lay beyond Mayachnyy, roughly circular and eight miles in diameter. Petropavlovsk lay nestled on its eastern shore.
Lofton twirled a knob and the local chart popped onto the screen. Avachinskaya Guba was accessible through a four mile long passage bracketed with rocks, shoals, drying reefs and small islands. It was about two thousand yards wide at the entrance and indicated depth was fine: thirty‑nine feet. But the passage funneled at the other end to a five-hundred-yard width.
Tricky. He needed good visibility to navigate the channel and he didn't want to key his periscope radar around a major Soviet naval base. He decided to approach manually by periscope and use the pilotage program on his NAV display as backup.
Brutus crept at periscope depth. Speed: ten knots. Very quiet; Lofton listened to his breathing, checking his watch: 0508 local time. Petropavlovsk time, Soviet time! Soon he would be in the midst of one of the most powerful fleets in the world.
He bit his thumbnail and checked again: 0508.
Another ten minutes before he would lift the periscope. He checked the master display and called up his passive sonar. Nothing. No fishing boats, no destroyers, no ASW helos or sonobuoys or torpedoes, just...nothing. He shook his head. He could be in a black hole as far as he knew. Still quiet on this--what day was it? His Casio said Monday, the twentieth, which meant local time was Tuesday the twenty-first. He'd crossed the International Date Line. Brutus's original ETA at Mys Mayachnyy had been set for five- fifteen the previous afternoon, but repairs and helical spins had slowed him down. Just as well, he would have had to loiter and wait for daylight.
0517. Good enough. Lofton swung the periscope housing into place, then raised the scope to full height. Depth: twenty feet. He wiggled the joystick slightly and worked up to eighteen feet. He wanted just the periscope's tip above water; six inches, that was all, no wake. He pulled the throttle back and watched the speedo. There, three knots, time to peek. No--one more thing. Check the passive sonar; all green? OK, all clear.
He tapped the joystick back slightly: seventeen feet. Good. Lofton put his face to the eyepiece, his first look at the outside world in six days.
Brutus's periscope was still underwater. The water was gray, lighter toward the surface. Sediment zipped past his lens, a few bubbles, the surface was mirrored just above. It looked calm, no thundering rollers or breakers, just a softly undulating upside-down silver smoothness.
He eased a slight up-angle. The periscope broke the surface, skipped through a wavelet, churned bubbles, then held above the Pacific.
Overcast. The cloud's bottoms looked to be about five thousand feet. The North Pacific was calm; he trained the periscope left of his heading.
A sharp, angular moonscape jumped through the lens. Three mountains, two conical, the third, the nearest one, a large amorphous mound; gray, yet alive, glistening, waiting. A coastline, still dark, rose on the horizon. Jagged features came into focus as he flipped to high power. No ships or watercraft. He flipped back to low power and rotated the periscope through a careful 360 degree arc, then checked the sky. Nothing. Quiet. No ships, no fishing trawlers. Maybe the Russians had taken the day o
ff.
He trained ahead again, wanting to identify those peaks. First, the big one to the southwest. He punched Nav-Pilot-Ident on the CRT, then checked the screen:
VULCAN VILYUCHICK - EXTINCT VOLCANO 254/54 nm
Desolate, threatening. Lofton's throat became dry as he went back to the periscope. The next was a cone-shaped peak. White slabs of snow ran down its sides. Closer, its base was almost visible. He punched Ident again:
SOPKA KORYAKSKAYA ‑ EXTINCT VOLCANO 262/36 nm
He checked the third peak, the high mound:
SOPKA AVACHINSKAYA ‑ ACTIVE VOLCANO 268/22 nm
Another full sweep with the periscope showed all clear. Then he checked the promontories. They were large, enormous; some were sheer cliffs, hundreds of feet high. A high-power view of the shoreline showed rocks and reefs, white water tossed at their bases. He saw a few sandy beaches, yet no greenery to speak of. Maybe it was too early to see trees and shrubs.
He checked the NAV screen, watching landmarks scroll on the Ident program as he slowly trained the scope: Bukhta Sarannaya, Ostrov Starichkov, Mys Bezymyannya, Kamniri Brata. There! Stop! Mys Mayachnyy, his last way point. From this angle it looked like a continuous shoreline.
Lofton took a deep breath and dropped the scope. Those monstrous cliffs: He'd have to draw closer before he found the channel. It ran on a north‑south axis and wouldn't be visible until he was almost on it. Lofton retracted the periscope housing, then pushed the joystick and dove to five hundred feet. He nudged the throttle up and Brutus's speed climbed evenly, quietly to fifteen knots. He reset Auto, then checked the clock: 0519. He would take another look in twenty minutes.
Lofton sat back and peered at the squiggly lines on the passive sonar CRT: OK. He checked the NAV display and watched the range to Mys Mayachnyy click down. His mind rose to the surface and what he'd seen through the periscope. The vision flashed; those tall, gray‑whitish, hulking volcanoes, straight out of Disney's A Night on Bald Mountain. Interesting, the composer was Russian, Mussorgsky, he must have had Sopka Avachinskaya in mind for Vulcan's redoubt.
THE BRUTUS LIE Page 18
