“Sampson, Merriam and Nixon,” he continued. But this time he reached over Juarez’s shoulder and pressed the button himself. The explosion forced the black smoke out of the shelter in a huge, billowing cloud of fire and debris.
Again, he waited, then said, “Langston, Bright and Bartoski.”
Juarez depressed the red button labeled ‘6’. The last of the weapons detonated, just as it was designed. The fire burned on for half an hour until finally, they could see no more flames and the black smoke began to die away in wafts and puffs.
It was high noon on Unalaska Island. Now there would be peace and security, at least, while they each awaited the inevitable, slower death by starvation.
“Don’t ever mess with my people again,” Winsteed said in a clear strong voice at the monitor before him as the room exploded in cheers and shouts of joy.
“Bring the chopper home,” Winsteed ordered, crushing his cigar out on the top of the table. “And Leighter…”
“Sir?”
“You and Juarez prep the VTOL for takeoff in 38 hours for your run to Pacifica.”
“Yes, sir!”
Rising from his seat, he turned his back on the monitor and the room, then paused. To no one in particular, he said to himself in a low voice, his eyes cast to the floor, “Well, there were only a handful of us left on this tiny island in the middle of nowhere, and still we just had to find ways to kill one another by means more horrible than even nature could gin up on her worst days. I guess God had us figured right all along. We just got what was comin’ to us, that’s all.” He then slowly walked to his quarters and closed the door quietly behind him.
71
Lew sat at his electronics work bench in Miller’s cave, slouched over his tall stool, his fingers absent-mindedly twirling a circuit board over and over in his hand.
“Ya know,” Wattenbarger said from behind him, “I think I’m actually getting used to this O’Douls.” Warren turned to face him as Wattenbarger downed the last drops from his daily allowance.
“Now you’ve done it. No more beer allowance until tomorrow. And by my clock, the day’s just startin’.”
“Well, the good news is – at least you can’t call me an alcoholic. An O’Dolus fan, maybe. Alcoholic, no way!”
“I’m really at the end of my rope on this deal,” Warren said somberly. “I just can’t figure out why we can’t get this junk to work. I swear, the only option we have at this point is to go back to the observatory and see if we can find the problem there.” His face was clouded with frustration as he slid off his stool and took a step toward Wattenbarger.
“I think it’s Mel,” he whispered, his eyes downcast, as though he were embarrassed.
“What d’ya mean?” Wattenbarger asked, instantly defensive.
“Now just listen to me for a minute,” Warren responded quickly, anticipating his friend’s response. “Keep your head screwed on for just a second and hear me out.”
Wattenbarger looked stern, then nodded. “This had better be good.”
“Mel was the last one up on the tower,” Warren whispered in a hoarse, low voice. “She installed the transmitter repeater. If she did anything, even by accident, then that could be our problem. That repeater and the antenna she put up there have to work or we can’t communicate, which is exactly what’s happenin’.”
“I heard that,” Mel said, hobbling up from behind them. “So it’s my fault, is it? It’s my fault that your electronic wizard crap doesn’t work, huh?” They turned to see her standing with her hands resting on her hips in defiance.
“Mel, Lew was only saying that the repeater might be the source of the problem. Hey, anything could’ve happened to it! Lighting, a loose wire, any number of things…”
“Then you didn’t need to use my name! But you did, so what’s the connection then, if it’s lighting or a loose wire? Why the focus on Mel?”
“Sweetheart,” Wattenbarger said, trying to reason with her, “he only used your name because you were the last one up the tower. It has nothing to do with you personally!”
“Then, I ask again, why – why - did you use my name?”
“Look,” Warren snapped, losing all pretense of appeasement. “We have exactly six months of food left, then we die a horrible death by starvation. In the end, statistics, history and experience tell me that we’ll end up eating one another’s corpses before it’s all over. So excuse me if I’m worried about the only chance we have of making it out of this cave alive – if I happen to be the only one working the problem!”
“I see Lew, oh wondrous and all seeing one,” Mel said bitterly. “Not only have you been everywhere, done everything and know all, you now claim personal experience in cannibalism!”
“What in the hell are you talkin’ about, woman?”
“Lew, you used the word ‘experience’ in reference to cannibalism,” Wattenbarger said in a genuine effort to defuse the argument.
“Hey, what’s goin’ on over here?” Charles asked, walking over to them while unhooking his headphones from his ears. “I can’t even hear myself think with all this yellin’.”
“Lew here say’s he’s had experience at cannibalism,” Mel quipped, pointing her finger.
Charles looked totally disgusted and took a step back. “You can stay far away from me from now on,” he said to Warren with a wrinkled face.
“That’s not what he meant,” Wattenbarger sighed in frustration.
“Oh, I see, so now you’re taking his side!” Mel cried with a hurt expression.
“Oh, brother,” Wattenbarger said with a deep sigh of resignation, leaning back against the cave wall and placing both of his hands against his cheeks.
A moment later there was a crash behind them. Everyone turned around to see little Alex standing there with an expression of fear on his face, looking down at a keyboard that he had accidentally pulled from the top of Warren ’s workbench.
“Oopsie!” he said with a cute baby’s grin of contrition.
“Why you spoiled, little brat,” Warren said through clenched teeth. “I’ll teach you to touch things that don’t belong to you!” He took three long steps over to Alex, lifted the child by his arm and smacked his bottom with his open palm.
Alex’s mouth opened wide as he fought to scream in terror and pain. But no sound came forth, just a convulsive sucking of air.
Marbles had been standing alongside the group, sitting on his haunches watching the entire human circus unfold before his limpid dog eyes. As the humans began to shout at one another, the black dog’s eyes had widened and his pupils dilated. When Warren snatched his pal Alex out of the sand, Marbles stood up on all four feet and began a subsonic rumble. But when Warren’s palm struck Alex’s bottom, Marbles leapt through the air and grabbed Warren ’s right front jeans pocket with his teeth and held on, snapping his neck and growling with a vicious, deep throated snarl.
“How dare you strike my child!” Mel screamed. She lunged toward Warren , dragging her cast-bound leg in the sand.
When Warren saw that in less than two seconds he was going to have to deal with considerably more mass and inertia than he presently held in his hand, he dropped Alex with a thump onto the ground, which jarred lose the child’s best primal scream.
With Marbles still firmly affixed to his jeans, Warren turned to face the onrushing Mel just as she drew back her right arm and plowed a doubled up fist along his right cheek. Along with the weight of the dog, this caused Warren to stumble backward, off balance, and begin plunging into the equipment rack behind him. His falling body was followed by Mel’s body who had lost her balance in the rush to strike Warren while she was still in motion. Both of them and Marbles fell into a heap amid the crashing pile of electronic equipment and racks.
“Damn!” Charles swore, shaking his head at the melee that had just erupted before his eyes.
Wattenbarger lunged to catch Mel’s falling form, but it was too late. He arrived just as a cloud of dust was settling around them.
Failing to catch Mel, he reached down and snatched the bawling Alex from the sand and held him in his arms, at which time Marbles let go of Warren , paced to Wattenbarger’s side and sat down, apparently entirely satisfied with his heroics. “You okay, little buddy?” he asked, to which Alex responded with a wider mouth, louder cry and a river of tears trailing down both dusty cheeks.
“I’ll kill you if you ever, ever, touch my baby again!” Mel screamed at Warren who raised his arm to prevent her from striking him again.
“Stop it! Stop it!” Wattenbarger yelled, placing his foot firmly on Mel’s good leg. “Now let’s all just get a grip and stop this insanity! You’re scaring Alex.”
“You just destroyed any hope that we had of ever getting out of here!” Warren screamed at Mel. “You just trashed our chances and our future. Look at this wreckage! We’ve worked for months and now it’s all gone, and so are our lives!”
“It was all just crap anyway, you monster!” Mel said, bursting into a round of tears. “You just wanted to keep us busy, that’s all. There was never any submarine and never any ELF and never any chance, and you knew it. You lied to us all along!”
“Mel, come here, just come here, baby,” Wattenbarger said gently, kneeling and reaching toward her while still clutching Alex tightly with his right arm. “It’s okay, give me your hand…”
Suddenly he stopped.
“Good Lord Almighty!” he said in absolute astonishment, pointing with his left hand. “Isn’t that the red light you’ve been looking for all along, Lew?”
All eyes turned to one of the electronic boxes now lying in a heap in the sand. And there on the face of the Observatory receiver, the red light began to blink, indicating data was now flowing from the cave’s broadcast equipment to the observatory’s ELF transmitter.
“It’s working!” Warren shouted with joy. “It’s actually working! I can’t believe it! It’s working, right now!”
Mel stopped crying and turned to face Warren . “So then it wasn’t a lie?”
Warren just shook his head with a cautious smile.
“No baby, it wasn’t a lie,” Wattenbarger said, kneeling before her, clutching his son-to-be who had become silent in his arms. “It’s really working now. And every American submarine in the fleets of all the oceans of the world can hear everything we have to say.”
Mel blinked twice and looked back at Warren . “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said, on the verge of crying again.
Warren laughed and leaned back in the pile of boxes, wires and displays. “Lady, if it weren’t for you and little Alex here, we never would’ve figured this mess out!”
Charles, who had not even moved a single inch during the entire conflict, simply shook his head slowly and repeated, “Damn!”
72
Fortunately for the Pacifica crew, one of the Jiang Zemin’s escape pods snagged on Pacifica’s permanently floating antenna platform as it rose to the surface. While the quantum storms killed the Chinese sailors inside, the escape pod would allow them instant access back into the huge submarine stranded below atop the seamount. After sunset, a team was dispatched to the surface to attach a tether to the pod and pull it back down to Pacifica’s docking bay.
Aaron Seven, Serea, Twink and the Commander stood at the docking platform as the craft was towed in and tied off.
“Okay, who wants to open the hatch and go in?” Twink asked.
“I vote for you,” the Commander said, eyeing Twink in total sincerity.
“Fine,” Twink replied, stepping toward the floating pod.
“Negative,” Seven responded firmly. “We have medical and security teams on the way.”
“It’s no problem,” Twink assured him. “I can do this.”
“Stand aside, Twink,” Seven ordered, looking at the pod floating before him. It was a squat, almost bulbous affair that allowed personnel to escape a disabled submarine. These pods were back-fitted to all new sub designs after the Russian Kursk disaster. The Kursk had a single pod, but, unfortunately for the crew, it was located on the opposite side of the sub from the explosion that sunk her and was therefore inaccessible to them. Later boats from many countries, such as the Jiang Zemin, featured smaller escape pods located along both sides of the ship.
This pod featured no windows and a single hatch atop fixed with an 18 inch wheel that could be operated from inside or outside for crew escape. But the most essential part for the Pacifica group was submerged underwater at the dock – the collar that would re-mate to the Jiang Zemin and allow Seven’s team to safely enter the Chinese submarine.
In minutes, two teams descended on the dock. One was a security team, bristling with automatic weapons. The other, a medical team to bag the bodies they knew they would find.
“Open it up,” Seven said to the security team commander.
The burly man dressed in black simply moved his hand in silent signals to his personnel who positioned themselves around the hatch at several angles with their weapons drawn and pointed at the opening. The security chief then braced himself and grabbed the wheel. It spun easily, and after three turns the hatch popped open with a hiss.
The smell emanating from the pod was sickening. It was so overpowering that the security chief stepped backward and covered his nose and mouth with his gloved hand. He gave another signal and he and his team donned gas masks.
“Sir, please step back, step back,” he ordered Seven and his entourage.
The odor was so penetrating and sickening that they needed no further encouragement and backed far away.
“What’s that smell?” Twink exclaimed. “They haven’t been in there long enough to decay, and they wouldn’t decay while they were topside anyway. As far as I know, they should be sterile.”
“Sterile, yes,” the Commander pointed out, “but scared and dying men often lose the contents of their bowels and stomachs before the end, particularly when exposed to fear, radiation, seasickness and panic.”
“That’s freakin’ nasty!” Twink responded.
In half an hour, they had pulled nine bodies out of the pod and zipped them into plastic body bags. In another hour, a Pacifica hazmat crew had cleaned and sanitized the pod. Another team hoisted it out of the water and sat it down on the dock, laying it onto its side.
“It’s all yours, sir,” the security chief said, motioning his hand toward the pod. “Clean and secure. Have fun.”
“Thanks, Larry, good job,” Serea said sweetly.
Seven walked slowly around the pod, paying particular attention to the docking end, which appeared clean, unmarred and ready for a return trip. Then he walked to the open forward hatch and peered inside.
It was a plain, fat cylinder that looked like it might have fallen off the back of a concrete truck. Inside it was painted a medium grey and the interior was strikingly plain with a dozen small boxes mounted to the side that he suspected were carbon dioxide scrubbers. There was also a speaker box, what appeared to be a first aid kit, a bottle of oxygen and a stainless steel bench that circled the midsection of the cylinder and could have seated a dozen crewmembers if they all squeezed together. After the hazmat team was finished, the interior smelled strongly of bleach.
Seven crawled inside the cylinder, even though it had been laid on its side. The Commander and Serea inched in behind him. They were able to stand upright in the center, although it was a tight fit.
“Joseph, what about the docking system? Will it work in reverse?” Seven asked, his eyes scanning every inch of the pod.
“Well, as you might expect, these units were never really designed for a return trip,” the Commander replied. “They’re built to be very positively buoyant for a reason. But I think if we counterweight it we can lower it back down into position. I looked closely at the docking mechanism itself. It appears as though it’s a simple snap and release mechanism, so, logically, it should work in reverse with enough oomph down from the top.”
“Good. Let’s put a plan together to get to the Jiang Zemin
as soon as possible,” Seven said. “We need to find out what’s going on down there and secure the plant ASAP. I’d like to have some Chinese juice flowing through our system in 48 hours.”
“I’ll get on it right away.”
They stepped outside the hatch and saw Frank Spencer standing with folded arms and watching them.
Seven and Serea stopped and looked at Spencer with some suspicion, waiting for whatever he had to say. But the Commander walked up to him with a nod, which Spencer returned.
Spencer, like Desmond, had visibly changed. His facial features were more relaxed and his manner clearly more pleasant.
“Can we use her for the return trip?” Spencer asked Seven with a cautious smile.
“I believe we can, Frank,” Seven responded with an outstretched hand. “We’re glad to have you on this team,” he offered sincerely.
Spencer took his hand and returned the grip with earnestness. “Well, we’ll make her work or die trying.”
“Yes, I believe that’s more a fact than a polite sentiment at this point,” Serea added. Then she stepped over to Spencer and kissed him lightly on his cheek. “You’re looking great Frank!” she said.
“And you, as always, Serea,” he responded with a genuine smile. Then he looked at Twink, who averted his eyes in obvious, extreme discomfort. “Twink, I’d like to offer you a public apology for my ill-treatment and misjudgment of you in the past,” Spencer said with sincerity.
Twink continued to look down at his feet, then he looked up and replied. “No problem, Admiral. Thanks.”
“Not Admiral anymore,” Spencer relied. “I’m retired.”
Seven looked surprised. “Since when?”
“Since the US Navy all but disappeared.”
“Well, it hasn’t exactly disappeared yet,” Seven pointed out.
“No, but it’s in the process of being absorbed into the new society. As for me, well, I’m an inflexible old coot who loves the Navy the way it is and I wanted to be sure and retire before it became something else.”
Quantum Storms - Aaron Seven Page 67
