by Rob Sangster
Jack wanted to keep him talking so he said, “I know that many more people have walked on the moon than have gotten to the bottom of the deepest oceans, but I read that Craig Venter and Richard Branson are spending fortunes on exploring the deeps. And James Cameron actually did it in 2012. Are you working on something like that?”
Renatus’s pupils flicked up and down several times like the spooling symbol that indicates a computer is “thinking,” then he turned and climbed the ladder to the main deck.
“Interesting,” Jack said to Debra, “almost as though he sees those guys as rivals. I wonder why.”
Jack and Debra followed Barbas up on deck. Watching Stefan at the helm, Jack wished he would steer off the wind a few points and let the sails fill to pick up the pace. To take his mind off the sails, he asked Barbas, “Where in Oregon is your processing plant?”
“Up the Columbia River from the port of Astoria.”
“I sailed into Astoria for supplies a few years ago. I remember a visitors’ information sign on the pier that called it the ‘Graveyard of the Pacific’ because there have been so many shipwrecks there. It was also the end of the trail for Lewis and Clark.”
Barbas looked surprised at Jack’s knowledge. “Before it lost out to Portland and Seattle, Astoria was a boomtown. It’s still a nice little port with deep water access and plenty of people desperate for jobs. But there was another reason I chose it. In 1810, John Jacob Astor sent a crew there to set up a fur trading business. When he died, he was the richest man in America, worth over $100 billion in today’s dollars. I thought that was a good omen for me.”
“How far is your site from Astoria?”
“About twenty miles upriver. I bought a tract of land from Trans-Continental Iron and Steel Company. The blast furnace, crucible, metal refinery, and even a rock crusher were still there. The equipment isn’t all that ‘clean,’ but the locals don’t complain.” Barbas looked at Debra. “I want your help with that. We’ll get together and decide on a strategy.”
As Excalibur approached Sausalito, the crew started the engine, dropped the sails, and hung the fenders over the side to protect the hull from scraping on the timbers of the pier. Even before the crew had finished making lines fast to the cleats, Barbas jumped to the pier. He turned back to face Jack with a crooked smile that seemed to say, “You’ll love being around my kind of life.”
Chapter 8
July 13
6:30 p.m.
Northeast Pacific Ocean
EIGHT TIMES IN THE past six hours, Challenger’s instruments had reported contacts. On closer examination, none had been Aleutian. Steve Drake’s eyes burned, and his mind played tricks, believing it saw what he wanted to see. He didn’t care. He’d go through this a thousand times rather than glide past a target without seeing it. And Aleutian wasn’t his only target.
He thought of himself as a surgeon using a robotic scalpel to perform a delicate operation. He sent signals down through thousands of feet of salt water to an autonomous robot the size of a golf cart. Two bulbous pods attached to its cylindrical body with V-shaped struts made it resemble a miniature starship Enterprise. Three months ago, using its state-of-the-art lights, cameras, and sensors, he’d mapped a mid-ocean ridge and discovered a small hydrothermal vent.
With a start, he realized he’d been daydreaming. He peered closely at his monitors and saw an indistinct echo and noticed a vague shape out of context.
“Mark this spot!” he shouted, letting his crew know that he saw something special on the screen. He felt the energy level in the room shoot up. Finding the prize was why they were all on board.
Alex Andrews, tall and taciturn, and Lou Potter, whose eyes had a permanent squint from decades at sea, were his experts in operating the tools used to search for targets. Alex called instructions to the bridge, and the helmsman immediately brought Challenger into a slow pirouette around the blip on the GPS and guided her into a search pattern. Even if the instruments sending gigabytes of data to Challenger’s computers detected what appeared to be the target, she’d continue until she completed this sequence.
Lou took manual control of the multiple lights and cameras. Steve grasped the joysticks that manipulated the “arms” and “hands” extending from the robot probe. By the time the probe had made its second pass over the target, feedback from sensors and video images made it clear they were looking at a sizable ship resting upright, keel wedged into the mucky seabed.
“Lou, I’m sending the probe in closer for a sweep up the starboard side. Get those lights focused on her stern and move them slowly up and down. Take plenty of photos.” He felt like a cheetah who had been chasing his prey and was about to leap onto its haunches and claw it to the ground.
The camera lens immediately showed him what he wanted to see. “Bull’s-eye, boys.” His analysis of Aleutian’s most likely track and his calculations of the effect of current during her long descent had been dead on.
“Now we’ll poke around and figure out why she’s on the bottom.” He had the robot slowed to a crawl along the 160-foot hull and saw the effects of maintenance done on the cheap. There were patches of hull paint that didn’t match and more rust than he would have permitted on any vessel he owned. But he saw no sign of any breach in her watertight integrity.
“Look at that,” he said, pointing at the fifty-foot long Greenpeace placard painted on the hull. It told him that the captain of Nikita Maru knew exactly who he was attacking.
During a slow journey along the hull on the port side, the lights picked out a ragged puncture an RPG had made forward of the deckhouse.
“That one might have knocked out a refrigerator in the galley,” Alex said, “but otherwise, no big deal.”
Steve knew Aleutian’s crew had reported an RPG hit on the fantail, so he made the probe hover aft of the stern while he took a closer look. There was enough twisted metal that Aleutian’s captain must have worried about damage to the rudder or steering gear, but he’d reported no difficulty in maintaining course.
He pulled the robot back a few more yards for one last slow pass. “Lou, shine the lights on deck and on the superstructure.” He pointed to the monitor. “Look at the lifeboats, boys, still locked in their davits. This ship is so old it must have required manual action by the crew to release them, and they never had time. She went down fast, and that wasn’t caused by those RPGs. No sign of having been hit by anything big like a missile. No damage from a collision, and there’s no debris field.”
“Even if someone deliberately opened all her seacocks,” Lou said, “the crew would have had time to put out a Mayday.” He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
“All right, boys, time to move on to our next task. Set the course I laid out, then write up the notes on Aleutian.”
The crew could bring up the probe without him, so he hurried to his stateroom and closed the door. His heart was beating faster already. Challenger was finally bringing him closer to his dream.
Years ago, he’d read a long report of a deep sea exploration undertaken in 1960. Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh had piloted the bathyscaphe Trieste seven miles down into the Mariana Trench near Guam. He’d admired their courage, but since they couldn’t maneuver Trieste they’d come right back up, having traveled only a vertical column of water, not the seabed. Mostly because of pathetic lack of curiosity, Trieste had not had a successor during more than half a century.
Before reading that report, he’d been satisfied being an expert at finding sunken treasures. But Piccard and Walsh had inspired him to do three things: Explore much deeper. Do it in person. And serve his curiosity about the vast ocean depths rather than merely retrieving objects from the seabed. He’d decided right then to have a sub built that could reach the sea bed thirty-six thousand feet beneath the surface.
He sighed, remembering how, year after year, other projects had tak
en his time, and he hadn’t gotten the sub started. Then, a few years ago Sir Richard Branson had announced that he intended to dive to the deepest points in five oceans. Branson’s Virgin Oceanic Expedition had built an eighteen-foot long submarine out of carbon fiber composite and titanium with a quartz dome. Branson claimed that its thrusters and stubby wings enabled it to “fly” like a manta ray through the ocean. Branson’s announcement had made Steve feel like he was being choked. Someone was already doing what he promised himself he would do.
Since Branson made no secret of the specifications and components of his submarine, Drake had let his engineers copy them. He’d felt bad about that, but it was a shortcut that got his project underway. Like Branson’s sub, his could dive about four hundred feet per minute and navigate across five to ten miles of ocean floor. Perfect for what he wanted to do. All of the work had been done in a nondescript hangar on the Strait of Juan de Fuca near Seattle.
During the building process, he’d come to terms with the difference between sitting on the surface aboard Challenger and diving to depths himself. In the latter case, rescue was impossible.
He glanced at the three framed photos screwed to the wall of his stateroom. They had been taken by one of his robots in the course of another underwater project eight thousand feet down near the Galapagos Islands. They showed his unexpected discovery of a hydrothermal vent. What made it such an awesome find were the six-foot tall tube worms around the vent that were thriving despite total darkness, no photosynthesis, and no standard nutrients. Most explorers would have missed the significance, but his training in science signaled him that what he was seeing might rewrite chemistry and biology textbooks.
While still at sea on that exploration, his mind had raced ahead. Searches for signs of life on other planets and beyond had been based on the assumption that conditions necessary for life had to be the same as those on Earth. But since he was seeing life flourish in the seemingly harsh conditions in and around a hydrothermal vent, it might flourish in similar conditions beyond our planet. That thought had grabbed him. He had to learn more. Back in the States, he’d become obsessed with those tube worms. How had they originated? How did they interact with the hydrothermal vent? Were there other new life forms in and around such vents? He remembered the Friday night during a party at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego when he’d reached the conclusion that learning the secrets of HTVs and new life forms would be his legacy to humankind.
He’d spent countless hours calculating where he’d be likely to find hydrothermal vents, finally concluding that one of the most promising areas was the northeast Pacific Ocean off the coasts of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. He’d just decided to visit that area when the call came from Jack Strider. He had agreed to help because Aleutian was somewhere in his HTV search area. Now he felt a vent, a big one, somewhere nearby. His feelings about his quest were so intense he thought he might be infected by the same madness that drove Captain Ahab. He shook his head to clear it and called Jack Strider.
“Steve Drake here. My search is over. I think you understood that the chances of my locating Aleutian were worse than finding an honest money changer in Morocco.”
“I did, but I still hoped—”
“Well, I beat the odds. Aleutian wasn’t where your information said she should be, so I applied the variables that could have affected her, and that’s where I went. My robot probe and video cameras finally found her at forty-eight hundred feet. She had Aleutian painted on her bow and a fifty-foot Greenpeace placard on each side. I’ll email the photos to you and Greenpeace.”
Strider didn’t reply. Steve knew he must be thinking about the crew, maybe even knew some of them, so he continued. “That ship went down a hell of a long way from land, and if it carried any survival gear it was probably ancient. There can’t be any survivors.”
“I understand. You have our thanks.” A long pause. “Look, could you tell why she sank?”
“With no holes below the waterline, I’m sure she wasn’t sunk by Nikita Maru. What did cause it is a damned mystery.”
Strider was silent for another few moments. “We’re grateful to you for stepping up so fast. Let me know how much Greenpeace owes you.”
He thought about that. “I don’t want any more of their money. As soon as we switch the gear we’re using, I’m taking Challenger on a search of my own.” He looked again at the photos on his wall.
“Very interesting. Tell me about it.”
“You’re a lawyer. Can I trust you not to talk about it, even to Greenpeace?”
“I’m not your lawyer so there’s no attorney-client privilege, but I give you my word.”
“I got rich finding sunken treasures. My new passion is hunting hydrothermal vents. Until now, people who found an HTV acted like Stone Age savages picking up nuts that fell from a tree. I’m going to change that by figuring out what the role of HTVs has been on this planet. From what I’ve already found, I’ve catalogued terabytes of data.”
“So you’re hunting for another one?”
“Not just ‘another one.’ I believe there’s a granddaddy HTV that’s hundreds of thousands of years old and dwarfs the others. I’m going to find it.”
“Why do you think you can find it when no one else has?”
“Because I know where to look, and I have a secret weapon: my own two-man submarine loaded with sophisticated instruments.”
“Good luck with your hunt, and thanks again.”
He broke the connection. There was already a perpetual knot in his stomach over the possibility that someone else might find the granddaddy hydrothermal vent before he did. So why had he told Strider about it? Maybe because he admired the way Strider had pulled out all the stops to find Aleutian. Or maybe because he had an odd premonition that Strider could be of use to him in the future.
Chapter 9
July 14
8:30 a.m.
Astoria, Oregon/platform
AT THE ASTORIA airport, the pilot of Barbas’s helicopter nodded at Jack and Debra as they approached. Then he squinted at Gano who was dressed like a yacht captain, including white boat shoes and a billed cap whose emblem read El Paso Yacht Club. The pilot turned to Jack. “I make a run in from the platform and back every other day, and I can tell you no one makes this trip without Mr. Barbas’s say so. I was told to expect you two, but not . . . him.”
Jack wasn’t surprised. To avoid a hassle, he hadn’t mentioned Gano to Barbas in advance. “Call Mr. Barbas. Tell him Ms. Vanderberg and I are bringing an assistant. We’ll wait in the car for five minutes.”
After they walked back to the car and got in, Gano said, “If I had my .38 I’d make that egg-sucking coyote do a little dance.”
“Not cool,” Jack said. “If we’re going to represent Barbas, I want to see what he’s doing out there. Roughing up his pilot would really piss him off. I’ll handle this my way.”
A few minutes later, seeing the pilot ambling over, Gano started the engine. The pilot broke into a run.
“Mr. Barbas said it’s okay, but he ain’t happy about it.” His surly tone meant Barbas must have taken his annoyance out on him. “Now hand over your cell phones or cameras. Pick them up when we get back. No one takes a cell phone to the platform and there’s no Internet for the crew. Out there you’re out of contact with the world. That’s the way Mr. Barbas wants it.” He stuck his jaw out, expecting another hassle, but confident Barbas would back him on this one.
They handed over their phones. Jack knew Gano had a miniature Nikon in his jacket pocket that shot photos through what looked like a button hole.
As they approached the helicopter, Gano whispered, “When I was searching for Aleutian, this is the helo that played long-range tag with me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hey, if you spot a cool chick at a cocktail party, then see her som
ewhere else a couple of days later, you’re likely to recognize her, right? I’m a pilot, so these birds don’t all look alike to me. This is the one.”
Why was Barbas having his platform’s perimeter patrolled?
The helicopter lifted off to the southwest. Out a starboard window, Jack saw the bridge spanning the Columbia River in the distance and the light blue shallow water over the deadly “Graveyard” bar. Then they were over the featureless Pacific with no way to measure progress besides a watch. Finally, the platform appeared on the horizon.
“Platform, dead ahead,” the pilot said.
Jack had researched deepwater platforms, mostly oil drilling rigs, so he was amazed by the massive size of this one. It was a rectangle, wider than a football field and more than three times as long, resting on twelve hollow tubes.
“Those tubes run down to horizontal pontoons about fifty feet underwater that hold fuel or seawater as ballast,” Jack told the others. “In rough water, a floating structure like that one is much safer than one resting on fixed legs or tethered to the bottom.”
Debra pointed at a narrow structure three stories tall running along one side of the platform. “That reminds me of the superstructure of an aircraft carrier.”
“It probably contains the bridge, navigation, communications and the computer center,” Jack said.
Two sturdy hoists stood on the centerline of the platform with a box-girder structure between them. Beyond them he saw a couple of heavy-duty pedestal cranes. More than two dozen modular metal buildings were located around the deck. As the helo drew closer, workers stared up. None waved.
