Far From The Sea We Know (26 page)

“What do you think about this video and
their story?” Penny asked Chiffrey in a voice that sounded suddenly
too loud in the small lab.

He scratched behind his ear, longer than
seemed necessary. “Even if I hadn’t seen the video, I would still
have been convinced that these people were sure they saw something
extraordinary, just from speaking with them.”

“They were telling the truth?”

“In the sense that they believed it to be.
They weren’t lying.”

“Was it you who interrogated them?” she
said.

“More like I talked with them, a
conversation. Not the Inquisition. That doesn’t really work anyway,
not for what we want. We have people who are good at reading folks,
who can catch a lie, just like that. So they sat in on the
interviews. Got a little bit of training in that area myself, truth
to tell.” He smiled but looked down as he did. “We didn’t lean on
them, we conversed with them a little, but mainly the idea was to
let them talk. It’s the only way I work. We put them in conditions
where they felt they would be listened to in a respectful way, and
then listened. And believe me, once these folks got going, we
logged plenty of listening, although much of it was the same over
and over and much of it was digression into practically anything
you can imagine, including Doris’s recipes for eel pie. Her mother
was a Cockney, though she grew up in the States.”

He squinted and rubbed his eyes, covering a
yawn. “You couldn’t really call what I described an interrogation,
could you?”

She held her tongue. This was not the time
to start sniping again. “Okay, but them believing it doesn’t make
it the truth.”

“Ain’t necessarily so, agreed. However,
there is the video, which we do believe is real, that is, not
doctored.”

“What do you think we were looking at?”

“Easier to say what it wasn’t. No blast
outward. More of a…well, one lab rat I spoke to said it was like a
tornado rotating in both directions at once. All that plus
extremely high intensity light coming from some as yet unknown
source.”

“Both directions?”

“I know. We’ve got some good people trying
to model it. They keep coming up with stuff like ‘five dimensional
inverse vortex muffins,’ or some such gobble. Sorry, not my field.
I can give you their report, but it’s heavy lifting.”

“What about unusual atmospheric
conditions?”

“Ah, you mean ‘energetic ethers,’ and their
like. Typically, ball lightning—if it exists at all, and most
people who study such things are not convinced—is twenty
centimeters in diameter. There have been rare reports of up to
twenty meters.”

“Well, twenty meters is in the ballpark,”
Penny said.

“Not really. Our estimate put it at six to
eight hundred meters. Must have really been something, being there,
experiencing it. We haven’t completely ruled out ball lightening
and the like, but it seems highly doubtful.”

“What about gas eruptions?” Andrew
asked.

“Apparently, they leave plenty of traces of
something in the water that can be tested, even weeks later. We
found no indication of a deep-sea eruption, or volcanic activity,
either. No evidence, not a shred.”

Penny paused, then said, “I know you say you
could tell a fake, but isn’t it possible to produce something that
looks completely real? Special effects. CGI. Maybe someone is a
step ahead of you?”

Chiffrey shook his head. “You’d have to have
access to the best hardware and software to come close to fooling
an expert, and we have the best experts. Even then, our people
still feel there are always ways to tell. Analyzing the scanning
lines of the picture, for instance. Heck, even we couldn’t do
that
good a job. Not that we would usually have a legitimate
reason to, of course. Anyway, it would cost a fortune and still not
work. I’m satisfied that the video is genuine.”

“Any ideas at all what it was?” Andrew
asked.

“Not really. There was an early theory that
a nuclear submarine exploded.”

“Did you account for all of yours?” Penny
said.

“The Navy has just completed that.”

“What took them so long?” she asked.

Chiffrey sighed. “Normally, these subs are
out of contact for long periods of time. The whole point of that
kind of operation is to keep their exact location a secret.”

“You don’t always know where they are?”

“Correct. Sometimes the commander just
tosses dice to decide where to go. That’s not classified, by the
way”

“You’re kidding!”

“After they leave port, they let the dice
pick the route. That way, there is no possibility that someone not
on the sub can know where it is, at least by espionage. I’m talking
about the subs that carry missiles, of course. Tridents and the
like.”

“Yes, but dice?”

“Gambling with death, yes, I get that
metaphor thrown at me several times a year, so I’ll save you the
trouble of belaboring it. They rarely surface, but we do have a
communication system that can reach them even when they are
underwater, but it’s slow and we have to wait for them to initiate
contact.”

“All accounted for?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Could it have been someone else’s?”

“We don’t think so. A nuclear accident,
again, there would be abundant evidence. Radiation, for
instance.”

Penny was getting tired of her own voice but
kept asking questions.

“Could it have been some other kind of
accident?”

“What kind of accident leaves no trace?”
Chiffrey said. “No debris, not a stick. And remember, we’ve scanned
top to bottom. Nada. We didn’t have anything at all until this
little side trip of our own through the Northwest’s version of the
Bermuda Triangle.”

He laughed softly. “That’s what Doris
Glister called it, come to think.”

He got off the stool he had been perched on
and moved around the small lab, stretching. He noticed something
and walked over to the porthole, smiling. “Well, finally the tugs
have got some tow lines on the ships. But what do you think?”

“Good that they’re getting towed back, I
guess,” she answered.

“No, I mean…listen, I got nothing more than
a big fistful of air as far as explanations for what’s happened
here. Let’s see, the behavior of the whales, but especially their
sudden disappearance, the transceiver glommed into the floor up
there on the bridge like a tick on a hound, four props falling off
two Navy ships at the same time —all that’s substantial and can’t
be explained.”

“And your divers,” Andrew said.

“Plus something damn strange going on with
the drive shafts of those ships,” Chiffrey continued. “None of that
makes sense, plus we have a mass of anecdotal incidents, and this
bizarre video. Well, it’s just not coming together for me. By the
way, anything new on the transceiver?”

“Nothing definite,” Andrew said.

“But?” Chiffrey’s instincts were good.

“Watching it, testing it, but being
careful.”

“Well, fine,” Chiffrey said, then he
laughed. “Especially since it’s the only one we have. But look,
there has to be a reason why the
Valentina
continues to run
clean and free while the Navy got skunked. And what I need to keep
you all in this game is a reason.”

Chiffrey caught Penny’s look and replied to
the unasked question. “I think you’ve already figured that out.
They won’t hesitate to take you out unless we can show them why
they should leave you in. Is the transceiver still growing? The
roots or whatever they are?”

Andrew shrugged. “They slowed down when they
reached our instruments. Not much happening now, and nothing of
ours affected adversely as far as we can tell. No detectable signal
going out, either.”

“At some point, we need to let the really
good people get a firsthand look at it.”

“Unlike the knuckle-draggers out here,” she
said.

He gave her a tired smile and said, “Have
mercy. I meant specialists who might have some insights as to
whatever is really going on here.”

She didn’t answer. Andrew picked up the
slack by simply saying, “The Air Force radar problem.”

“That alone wouldn’t have been enough to
bring me here. If that were the only thing that had happened, we
might have just investigated it and finally dropped it as NRII—Not
Resolvable, Insufficient Information.”

“Then the video turned up.”

“We couldn’t ignore the connection with the
Honey Pot
and later, the whales. The similarities in
behavior of both crews and the same general location brought me
here, and there’s no going back. Everything I am telling you is
strictly confidential, of course. It is now a matter of national
security, and I expect you to take that seriously. Hope you read
the fine print before you signed that agreement.”

Penny didn’t want to dwell on the agreement
she had reluctantly signed and pushed it out of her mind.

“You need to tell us what exactly happened
there,” she said. “At the Air Force radar installation.”

“Hard to explain, but it’s not something
anyone had ever seen before, and we never could trace it to any
kind of malfunction in the system. A few other stations picked it
up as well, so there had to be some external cause.”

“What did it look like?”

“A large pattern of total interference,
circular, symmetrical. Like there was something saturating the
whole area, covering hundreds of square kilometers. The gear is
hardened and the best there is. Not easy to jam. And there’s the
Honey Pot
.”

“Their radar also caught it?”

“No. Well maybe, but they weren’t watching
if it did. My point is the incident on the yacht matches ours to
the minute. How could they have known? If it isn’t obvious, that’s
also another reason I don’t believe the
Honey Pot
crew faked
the video. And after what’s happened since, it’s clear to me that
we are up against something of an entirely different order. Be
sweet if I could pull all this together, and I’m convinced that
those whales—and Matthew’s purple whale in particular—are the key.
That’s our lead.”

Andrew glanced at the monitor screen as if
visualizing what they had seen. “Don’t understand how your radar
incident and the whales are connected, but I agree. Somehow they
are.”

Chiffrey sat back down on a stool and gazed
intently at a place about three feet in front of his eyes. “Where
do you think the whales are now?”

“Normally I’d start looking north as that’s
where they were headed. Their migration routes are fairly
predictable. Or were until now.” He smiled, but barely.

“Who do you have up there?”

“People at counting stations on some
islands. Volunteers overlooking straits and channels where they
pass.”

“Maybe you should alert them.”

“Already have.”

Chiffrey nodded. “Of course. Anyone have any
next steps in mind? Now’s the time.”

“I’d like to see the bottom scans you did,”
Andrew said, “Anything you have, really. You do any visuals of the
bottom?”

“No. Kind of deep there and that is
time-consuming. The sonar equipment we have is more reliable than
any camera, and we have really good people for this, as good as any
anywhere. Trust me.”

“Still like to check,” Andrew said.

“I’ll get right on it, then. I’ll have to go
over to fetch them. By the way, it would be great if we could
establish a dedicated downlink here so we could send information
back and forth to our people. For now, is tomorrow soon
enough?”

“Like them printed.”

“Well, it will be faster if I just get the
files, and then you can print it all out on your own plotter. How’d
that be?”

“Fine. Your Navy friends?”

“They’ll follow at a discreet distance. And
how about the
Valentina
?”

“The whales could be anywhere. The
Honey
Pot
location is where I believe we should go next.”

“But there really doesn’t seem to be
anything there.”

“It’s a possibility of a wild goose chase
wherever we go.”

“I take your point, but—”

The engines suddenly powered up, the hull of
ship resonating like a contrabass in its lowest registers.

“Hear that?” Andrew said. “We’re on our way
again.” Andrew went to the hatchway and listened. “They’re still
meeting, but there’s work I need to do.” He left without a word or
a glance back.

The tiredness that had been dogging her for
the last hour suddenly overtook her. Penny went back to her room
and lay down next to Matthew who was sound asleep. When she awoke,
it was late evening, and he was still sleeping peacefully like some
enchanted prince in a fairy tale. Should she wake him, she
wondered? No, just let him crash.

The crew had taken several breaks from their
meeting but, unbelievably, they were still not finished. She was on
the late watch and headed to the bridge, thinking to herself that
tomorrow was sure to be another long day. Then, out loud, she said
to no one but herself, “All the days will be long.” She didn’t know
why but recognized the words, as they sounded in her ears, as
truth.

When Penny arrived on the bridge for her
shift at the helm, Emory was yawning, but he cupped his mouth when
he saw her.

He answered her unasked question. “Malcolm
and I have decided to stay. Becka, too. Jack is going off as
planned, with Mary to look after him. Dirk and Lorraine are leaving
together. Daryl the cameraman, and the helicopter pilot, they’re
leaving, of course. Most of the core crew is staying, including
Mateo, thank God. We’ll still eat well. A Navy ship should be
coming soon for all who are leaving.”

“Really?”

“Lieutenant Chiffrey’s idea. To speed things
up and save a side trip back to port.”